NIU men’s golf coach Jack Pheanis brings a relatively inexperienced club into Monday and Tuesday’s Big Ten Intercollegiate Invitational Golf Tournament at Iowa City, Iowa, to tee off the fall golf season.

Gone are All-Mid-Continent golfers Mike Briggs, Brian King, Rick Stewart and Chad Behrends.

Taking their place will be three returning lettermen, a junior transfer and three freshmen. It would appear that with a virtually untested lineup such as this, the odds would be stacked against Pheanis bringing a third straight Mid-Continent Conference Golf championship to NIU. But the two-time conference Coach of the Year remains optimistic about the 1991 campaign.

“I’m very high on this team,” said Pheanis. “I think it could develop into a great team. After our top five players, there’s not much experience. However, that doesn’t mean they’re not good players.”

The top five golfers on the team will be freshmen Niclas Jinglov and Derek Schoonhoven, sophomore Jason Samuelian, junior Mark Voeller and senior Ted Meyer, who led the Huskies last season with a 76.1 average. The top five earned their spots after shooting 126 holes in two weeks.

After the tourney in Iowa, the team will set its sights on the conference championships in early October.

“Top to bottom, (the conference) is not as strong as some of them out there, but if you take the top five schools, it’s just as tough as anything you want to measure it against,” Pheanis said, referring to this year’s competition.

“Wright State has to be the favorite followed by Akron and a veteran Western Illinois squad. It’s a competitive conference. We’ve got two conference championships and we’re going to try real hard to grab that third one.”