As the men’s golf team ended its all campaign this past Monday and Tuesday at the 36-hole University of Louisville Persimmon Ridge Intercollegiate Tournament, the Huskies could only ask themselves one question.

What happened?

“We didn’t play very good in this tournament,” coach Jack Pheanis said. “Since we are such a young team, we made some mental mistakes.

“However, this is one of the toughest courses I’ve ever seen and the cold and windy weather didn’t help the situation.”

The Huskies placed 16th in the 18-school field, but the irony is that NIU shot a 331 for the first 18 on Monday and was in 14th place. Then NIU improved on the next 18 on Tuesday with a 317 but dropped two spots to finish 16th.

“We definitely improved over Monday’s scores, but it still wasn’t as good as we expected,” Pheanis said. “We expected to be at least in the upper half of the field.”

NIU’s 648 tally was only one stroke behind 15th-place Western Kentucky, but it was also 19 strokes ahead of Murray State and 38 strokes in front of last place Purdue.

NIU was only one of seven schools to improve from the first round to the second. Ironically, tourney winner North Carolina wasn’t one of those schools.

Individually for NIU, Jason Samuelian finished in a tie for 29th with a 157, Mark Voeller in 51st with a 162, Derek Schoonhoven 54th with a 163, Niclas Jinglov with a 166 and John

Larson with a 169.