Smith Tabbed SCAC Men's Golf Coach of the Year
LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. – University of Dallas men's golf head coach Garrett Smith has been named the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference (SCAC) Men's Golf Coach of the Year for the 2018-19 season. This is the first time a leader at the helm for the Dallas men's golf program has claimed the Golfer of the Year award.
Smith is the fifth Dallas coach and just the second spring coach to receive the SCAC Coach of the Year Accolade. Matt Buchhorn earned a share of SCAC Women's Track & Field Staff of the Year (2013), while women's soccer head coaches Kristina Corona (2012) and Angelina Pane (2014), and men's soccer head coach David Hoffmann (2017) earned the other three.
Smith arrived in March 2016 as the ninth head coach for the Crusaders men's golf team. In just three full years, Smith guided the Crusaders to a pair of their highest finishes in the SCAC Championship, with the latest counting as the first SCAC Title in Dallas Athletics history since joining the league in 2011-12. Dallas was in first after the completion of all three rounds at Valaar Creek Golf in Blanco, Texas, with scores of 295, 295, 296 for an 886. This bested No. 7 Southwestern University (890) and No. 22 Texas Lutheran University (890).
Under his tutelage, Smith had a pair of golfers in Emilio Montalvo (Mexico City, Mexico) and Erik Hamm (Brentwood, Tenn.) tie for second and claim All-SCAC First Team honors. Jacob Wade (Magnolia, Texas) notched All-SCAC Second Team and tied for sixth overall.
The week prior to UD's historic moment for a conference title, Smith had his players appearing to peak at the right time with a second place finish at a highly competitive field of 16 teams in the Rhodes Collegiate Spring Classic. Montalvo led Dallas again with school records for Low Second Round (139) and Low Three Round totals (210). The team also set record low round totals through the second (573) and third (858) trips.
Earlier in the campaign, Dallas had a Low Round record at the John Bohmann Memorial Invitational on September 11, 2018, with a 280. Montalvo also set a Low Three Round mark in that tournament held at Texas Lutheran.
For consecutive years, Dallas set the Low Average in a season with a 299.4 most recently. Montalvo posted a 73.69 Low Average for the new individual season mark in the school's record book, too.
Smith led his Crusaders to a top-four finish in six tournaments out of nine tournaments on the ledger. This included all three highly competitive fields in April that had top several nationally ranked opponents higher than the Crusaders in; whom some they edged.
Under Smith, UD ended the spring ranked 45th in golfstat.com which is the highest in the program. The team also received 15 votes in the Golf Coaches Association (GCAA) to the NCAA Division III Top 25. Only seventh ranked Southwestern was placed above Dallas among SCAC members.
Smith only graduates one from his current roster of nine next season, and will welcome all five participants (Montalvo, Hamm, Wade, Robby Evans (Flower Mound, Texas), and Seth McNeill (Plano, Texas)) back that were part of the 2019 SCAC Championship squad. Two will be rising seniors, while the remaining trio will be juniors.