Guest columnist — Ryan Keeney: Fight is still in us

Thursday, May 29, 2003 | 10:17 a.m.

Ryan Keeney is a freshman on the UNLV golf team and is writing a guest golf column exclusively for the Las Vegas Sun. He is part of the Rebels' five-man lineup in the NCAA Golf Championship in Stillwater, Okla.

On Tuesday after we left the course we wanted a quick dinner. We just wanted to get back because we were all so tired. So we went to Quizno's, our favorite spot, got that real quick and went back right into a meeting. It was mostly optimistic, I'd say.

We kind of tried to devise a more intense game plan for Wednesday. We tried to learn from other people's mistakes. We talked about who did what wrong, who did what well and what to try to do, to copy that.

The course played harder Wednesday. It's kind of disheartening right now to see that there's no wind because we played in a 10- to 15-mile an hour breeze most of the day. It wouldn't be too fair if it just stays like this. The wind made the course that much tougher.

Ryan (Moore), you know, he's the leader of our team and he played a great round Wednesday. A 71 is awesome. We all played pretty solid, 12-over (Wednesday), 25-over (Tuesday). We cut our over-par in half today, so that was good.

We had three bogeys on the 18th, so that's kind of a tough taste in our mouth. Trav (Travis Whisman) had an 81, and that's a little uncharacteristic. But it's such a hard course that anybody in the field can shoot high. I think Trav is going to work it out. We're going to expect good things from him. He's another leader on our team.

It's getting kind of sticky and I think it's in our best interests to get off our feet. This tournament is a marathon -- you need as much rest between rounds as possible. It's almost the most important thing of the week, water and rest.

But good golf shots are pretty high up there, too.

Ryan Keeney is a freshman on the UNLV golf team and is writing a guest column exclusively for the Las Vegas Sun. He is part of the Rebels' five-man lineup in the NCAA Golf Championship in Stillwater, Okla.