Fountain, Men's Golf Headed North As No. 1 Seed

Davis Love III, a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame, PGA champion and Ryder Cup captain, is inarguably Carolina golf royalty, so when you're a college sophomore and you get mentioned in the same historical context as Love, it makes people take notice.

That's right where Peter Fountain found himself last month when he tied for first in stroke play at the 2022 Atlantic Coast Conference Championship. The second-year Tar Heel from Raleigh was medalist in the 2021 ACC Tournament and followed that winning performance with a record 13-under 203 this year to tie Clemson's Jacob Bridgeman.

Bridgeman went on to defeat Fountain on the second hole of a playoff for the individual title, but Fountain has played six rounds of ACC Championship play in 23 under par and has yet to finish behind any other player in the league in two years of stroke play.

Love, the 1997 PGA champion, also had a pair of top-two finishes in the ACC Championships; he was runner-up in 1983 and medalist as a junior a year later. Fountain and Love are the only Tar Heels with two such finishes in the ACC Championships.

"To be mentioned in the same sentence with Davis Love is really cool," says Fountain. "He's always someone I've looked up to because he's a Tar Heel and he's had a really successful pro career."

Carolina won the stroke play portion of this year's ACC Championship at 35 under par, the second-best score in tournament history on a par 72 course. It was the second consecutive year UNC took the top spot in stroke play in convincing fashion, but Wake Forest edged Carolina, 3-1-1, in a tightly contested match in the semifinals.

The Tar Heels enter the 2022 NCAA Tournament as the No. 1 seed in the Yale Regional, hoping to advance to the NCAA Championship for the fifth tournament in a row.

The other No. 1 seeds include Arizona State (Stockton, Calif.), Oklahoma (Norman, Okla.), Oklahoma State (Columbus, Ohio), Pepperdine (Bryan, Texas) and Vanderbilt (Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.).

The top five teams in each of the six regionals will advance to the NCAA Championship, which begins May 27 at the Grayhawk Golf Course in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Fountain says the Tar Heels, who tied for second place in the 2021 Noblesville, Ind., Regional, are playing their best golf of the spring.

"I think we're playing well right now. We are all working hard and starting to peak at the right time. Everyone is focused on the same goal, which is to play well in each of the three rounds in New Haven and advance out of the regional. But we know every team in the tournament is good, so it's not a given that we're going to make nationals."

Carolina's lineup is deep, experienced and talented. But the field in New Haven is arguably the strongest of the six regionals. The Tar Heels are the top seed and the highest ranked (No. 5 in Golfstat and No. 7 in Golfweek), but the regional includes eighth-ranked Texas Tech, No. 17 Wake Forest, No. 20 Illinois, No. 27 NC State, No. 31 Charlotte and Yale, playing on its home course.

In addition to Fountain, the Tar Heel lineup features fifth-year senior Ryan Gerard, senior Ryan Burnett, junior Austin Greaser and freshman David Ford. All but Ford played in the 2021 NCAA Championship where Carolina was eighth among 30 teams after four rounds of stroke play and advanced to the quarterfinals, where it lost to Arizona State in match play.

Gerard enters the regional with a 70.47 stroke average this season, third best in UNC history. The Raleigh native is also third all-time at UNC in stroke average (71.73). He tied for seventh at the ACC Championship, one of his five top-10 performances this year.

Ford is the ACC's highest-ranked freshman and the second-highest ranked freshman in the country at No. 31 (Golfstat) and No. 35 (Golfweek). The Peachtree Corners, Ga., native also tied for seventh at ACCs at 8-under 208, the sixth time he shot below par in his last seven tournaments. He gave Carolina its point in the ACC semifinals with a 4&3 win over Parker Gillam.

Gerard leads Carolina in scoring to par this season at 34 under with Ford second at 29 under. Ford's stroke average of 70.63 is currently the fourth-best ever by a Tar Heel and second lowest in history by a UNC freshman.

Greaser is the third Tar Heel with a cumulative score to par in red figures for the season. The Vandalia, Ohio, native is 14 under par and he is Carolina's all-time leader in stroke average at 71.49. He was the runner-up at the 2021 U.S. Amateur at Oakmont and played two rounds in the 2022 Masters.

Gerard and Greaser both shot three rounds in the 60s to win their first respective collegiate titles in the fall – Gerard at 15-under 201 at Duke in the Rod Myers Invitational and Greaser with a hole out from the fairway to win by two at the Olympia Fields/Fighting Illini Invitational.

Gerard, Greaser and Ford were each selected to the 2022 All-ACC team, the second straight season UNC placed three on the all-conference team. Ford is the ACC Freshman of the Year and head coach Andrew DiBitetto is the ACC Coach of the Year.

Additionally, Burnett is playing his best golf of the season. The senior from Lafayette, Calif., ended an inconsistent fall with a tie for 13th at the Williams Cup at Eagle Point and has two top 10s and three top-20 finishes in his last four starts. That included a tie for 10th at 6 under in the ACC Championship; he lost 1 up to Michael Brennan in the semifinals.

Burnett is also no stranger to NCAA play. He shot 67-63 over the final 36 holes to tie for second as a freshman in the 2019 Stanford Regional and tied for 30th at the 2019 NCAA Championship. Last season he shot 68-69 in the final two rounds in the Noblesville Regional and 69 in the fourth round of the NCAA Championship at Grayhawk.

Burnett is second all-time in career stroke average at UNC at 71.60 over 116 rounds.

That brings us back to Fountain, whose career average is 70.83. He will qualify for the top spot on UNC's all-time scoring list after his next start in the regional. A year ago, Golfweek ranked Fountain No. 6 in the country entering the regionals. This year, Fountain is No. 134, but he is coming off his best finish of the season. He shot 68-67-68 in the ACC Championship; his 13-under-par finish is the lowest ever to par by a Tar Heel in an ACC Championship.

"I was trying to peak at the right time and it happened to be during ACCs," says Fountain, who set the UNC single-season scoring record (69.68) and was a first-team All-America and Jack Nicklaus Team selection in 2021 but had finished 51st or higher in four straight starts in February and March of this year. He shot a final-round 69 and tied for 22nd at the ASU Thunderbird a week before the conference championship.

"Growing up right down the road from Chapel Hill the ACC Tournament is one I've always circled. It's also the postseason. As much as I want to stay as focused on every other tournament, postseason means more and has a little bit extra motivation. You naturally focus on every single shot. I started hitting my driver well again in Phoenix, which made me believe ACCs was the week I was going start playing well and sure enough it happened."

Fountain had such a spectacular season a year ago, becoming the first Tar Heel freshman to earn first-team All-America honors and win the ACC title, that his fall play this season somehow left him wanting more. However, he tied for fifth at Eagle Point, eighth at Duke, 12th at the Blessings and 24th at Olympia Fields, and was a combined 3 under par over a dozen rounds. Very fine golf for sure, but it didn't quite measure up to his exacting standards.

"I can be very hard on myself," says the affable Fountain. "I'm a very competitive person. I get way too down on myself and in golf you can't do that. I was still hitting it well enough to play well but there were a couple of swing things, plus I got in my own head and was getting too down on myself.

"Last year was a huge blessing, but also a little bit of a curse because when you do that as a freshman the expectations are to do that again and accomplish even a little more. I was playing okay in the fall but not as well my freshman year and I started asking myself what's going on. It irritated me, but over the last few weeks I've thought, 'Alright, last year's over, let's forget that and get back to like the basics and start playing well again.'"

Fountain's strength is driving the ball long and straight, but he was fighting various parts of his game which led to other issues.

"I was hitting the ball well in the fall but was struggling to make putts and that got under my skin. Then the putting sort of transferred into other aspects of my game. I usually hit a lot of fairways. But to start the year in Florida I didn't really know where the ball was going off the tee. That's not going to lead to good scores when your strength becomes your weakness. Mostly it was mental. The coaches told me every golfer goes through it but I was going have to get in the dirt and dig my way out. I started playing better and then (2021 senior) Austin Hitt came to town and he saw a couple of things which helped me played solidly at Arizona State. I didn't play the greatest, but it was a lot better than anything else I had done in the spring."

Fountain credits DiBitetto and assistant coach Matt Clark with keeping him positive and bringing his game around.

"My short game has gotten exponentially better since I've started working with Deebs (DiBitetto). Before college that part of my game wasn't very good but he's good at making you believe in yourself. He talks to us before each tournament and you're ready to run through a wall after he does because he really makes you to believe in yourself.

"Clarkie walks with me a lot and is good at making me stay calm," adds Fountain. "I've always been someone that doesn't show any emotion when I play, but he can tell sometimes if it's going the wrong way and my head is spinning a little bit, so he's taught me how to stay calm. He doesn't talk a ton about golf when we're on the course, so it takes me away from thinking too much about the next shot. Whenever I hit a bad shot Clarkie usually tells me to take a drink of water and that usually does the trick or I'll untie my shoe and retie it to distract myself."

"We knew who Peter was when we recruited him, but he wasn't nationally a household name," says DiBitetto. "Then he explodes on the scene as a freshman, plays unbelievably well and was deserving of every honor and award that came his way, including first-team All-America. Human nature says anyone would want to repeat or even surpass what they did last time, but when you do that, you can get caught looking at those incredible results and try to replicate everything you did. You start looking left and right and not remembering where your foundation is and a little bit of that happened at times this year with Peter.

"Golf is a really hard game," says DiBitetto. "It's very physical with quick motions and lots of moving parts and it's an extremely difficult game mentally. He hit bad shots last year, but he didn't pay attention to them. This year, he noticed his bad shots and it affected him. He wasn't way off, just some minor things, but Clarkie and I had lots of conversations with him about expectations and his mental approach and reminded him to stay in his process. We also noticed some swing things, and Austin Hitt, who spent a lot of time with him last year, came in town and saw some things in his setup. So he made a couple of adjustments, particularly with his mindset and attitude and it was pretty clear at ACCs that Peter is back to being Peter."

As a team, the Tar Heels hope their strong play at the ACC Championship will lead to a successful start in New Haven. Carolina won three of its four fall tournaments and has been a consistent presence in the top 10 all season, even earning a brief stint at Golfweek's No. 1 in late September after victories at Duke and Illinois. However, the first-place finish in stroke play at the conference championship was the team's best in six tournaments in the spring.

"We did probably get ahead of ourselves a little bit to start the spring," says Fountain. "We were looking ahead to regionals and nationals. Lately we've done a good job of coming together and focusing not on the rankings, but our ultimate goals. We had a team meeting about a month ago and that's kind of when we started doing a lot better job of staying in the moment. The coaches really made us focus on the importance of staying in the next shot, the next round, the next tournament."

The Tar Heels are paired with No. 2 Texas Tech and No. 3 Wake Forest in the first round of the Yale Regional, which begins Monday, May 16.

"Our preparation for regionals was a little different this year," says DiBitetto. "Usually, we play regionals straight out of final exams, but this year we had Mother's Day and graduation in between, so we encouraged our guys to go home, spend time with their family and friends and come back fresh.

"Yes, we played well at ACCs, but we don't spend time as a program looking backward. We are looking to the next tournament, the next course and how it will play. Yale's course is a lot of fun and has an incredibly unique design. But it's difficult to prepare for. Thankfully we have bent grass greens at Finley, like Yale does, but it also has bent grass fairways, lots of blind shots and uneven lies, so we have been putting the guys in some areas on our course where they have to play off uneven lies. The next few days we will get to play Winged Foot, which is completely bent grass, and the Country Club of Fairfield, which has the same architect as Yale."

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Players Mentioned

Ryan Burnett

David Ford

Peter Fountain

Ryan Gerard

Austin Greaser

Austin Hitt