Men’s golf got the spring season underway Saturday with a fifth-place finish at the Forest Hills Collegiate in Augusta, Ga.

The Huskies finished fifth out of seven teams, with a total team score of 628 in the 36-hole event. Freshman Caulen Coe finished with an overall score of 151. Coe’s score was good enough for a finish of T10, which was Coe’s first career top 10 finish as a Huskie.

Head coach Tom Porten said the top 10 finish should help the freshman’s confidence going forward.

“It is a huge boost to Caulen’s confidence, playing on his type of grass, playing on Bermuda,” Porten said, according to a news release. “He grew up playing on this surface and is very comfortable on it.

“He tried to get aggressive late in the second round, trying to get into the top five, and he hit a ball off a pine tree into the woods and made a double bogey.

“Outside of that, he was clean all day and handled the difficulty of the greens, the firmness of the golf course, much better than the rest of our team.”

Host Georgia Regents University won the event with a team score of 594, which was seven shots better than second-place University of South Carolina Upstate. Meechai Padung of GRU took home the individual medalist honors with a two-round total of 143, which gave Padung a four-shot victory.

Freshman Jake Curwin finished with the second-best score for the Huskies, tying for 28th with a score of 159. One shot behind Curwin was freshman Pierrick Fillon, who finished tied for 30th. Junior Liam White finished one stroke back of Fillion, tying for 31st.

Porten said he was proud of how his team struck the golf ball, but the Huskies weren’t able to figure out the greens.

“The story of the day for our team was putting,” Porten said, according to a news release. “We shot 317 this morning and we three-putted 20 times. We are hitting the golf ball better tee-to-green, or around the green; unfortunately, we weren’t able to execute on the green, and if you don’t do that you won’t have anything to show for it on the scoring side.”

Porten said the course was a tough one and left everyone scrambling to adjust.

“The golf course was firm and fast. The hole locations were fair. But very difficult,” Porten said, according to a news release. “The scores were pretty high in the morning round. Some of the teams figured it out in the afternoon round, but we just didn’t.”