A strong final round from NC State men’s golf took the team to sixth place in a competitive field at the Lewis Chitengwu Memorial in Charlottesville, Va.
The team recovered from a poor five-over-par round two to land just behind all five top-50 teams featured in the competition. Four individual members of the Wolfpack placed in the top 25. It was Senior Evan Woosley-Reed and redshirt sophomore Rylan Shim who led the charge for NC State, with both finishing in a tie for 14th place.
This was Woosley-Reed’s second appearance of the spring season, and he made it count. The Tennessee transfer earned his second top-15 finish with the Pack, shooting under par on all three rounds.
Shim, a spring transfer, got back to the form he showed earlier in the season. Although his play tailed off on the later holes, eight birdies through the first eighteen put him six ahead of par at the end of round one.
Redshirt senior Markus Varjun flew up the scoreboard on the final day, finishing at 18th place after shooting four-under-par in the final round. Six birdies in round three brought him his second 18th-place finish in a row as he continues to put a stretch of solid play together ahead of the ACC Championship.
Sophomores Pearce Lewin and Xander Goboy also finished strong. Lewin shot three-under-par on the final round to end up in a 25th-place tie, while Goboy was a few strokes behind in 37th-place thanks to his two-under-par round three.
Goboy has been all over the place for the Pack, but when he’s on, he’s on. He has two top-five finishes in his last five events, and NC State will need that version of Goboy at the ACC Championship.
Senior Joey Lenane played another performance to forget, falling to 45th place after a strong opening round. Fifteen bogies and one double bogey hurt the card of the player who was once NC State’s strongest asset. After nabbing multiple top-10 finishes in the fall, Lenane has struggled in the spring, falling out of the national top 50 in February and tumbling all the way down to No. 193 after this event.
Host No. 2 Virginia took the event, finishing 13 strokes ahead of second-place Florida State. Sixth place isn’t first place, but the Wolfpack finished right behind a stacked top five.
Next up for the red-and-white is the ACC Championship, played from April 23 to April 27 at Shark’s Tooth Golf Club in Watersound, Fla.
