A baffling pin, a DQ and an apology. The ousted golfer blames only 1 person

Something was amiss in the opening round of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics Women’s Golf National Championship earlier this month.

That much was clear to Hannah Ulibarri on the 4th hole at host site Eagle Crest Golf Club, a lakeside resort course about 35 miles west of Detroit. As Ulibarri, a junior at The Master’s University, near Los Angeles, and her two partners played the par-3, they could see the group ahead of them milling about on the next tee box, seemingly nowhere near teeing off. 

This NAIA finale is the biggest event on Ulibarri’s calendar. As a freshman at her small Christian college, she had taken a one-stroke lead into the final round of the event before a crushing 78 left her in a tie for second. A year later, with her swing out of sorts, she missed the cut. This time around, Ulibarri told me the other day, “I definitely saw it as almost a redemption year.”

As Ulibarri and her partners strolled off the 4th tee, they spotted the backup at the par-5 5th. When they arrived on the tee, the group ahead of them was still waiting to hit. “We’re like, Oh wow, this is a big hold-up,” Ulibarri said.

The culprit was a wicked pin position on a shelf in the front-right section of the green, which became evident to Ulibarri’s group after they’d hit their tee shots and were waiting to play their approaches. “We didn’t have a great view, because we were far away,” Ulibarri said. “But we saw balls rolling back down and putts going up and down.” Ulibarri remembers thinking, This could be pretty tricky.

Tricky, sure. Other words also captured the scene: absurd, laughable, inexplicable. So inaccessible was the hole location that as the round progressed, the green produced not only four- and five-putts but also six- and seven-putts. By day’s end, the 5th-hole scoring average was a beefy 6.97, nearly two full strokes over par. Footage of failed putt attempts made their way to social media, and, soon after, major golf media outlets, including this one, began reporting on the inanity.

Feeling the heat, the NAIA released a brief semi-apology: “We regret to confirm that an unfortunate situation occurred at the NAIA Women’s Golf National Championship. The hole on No. 5 was incorrectly placed in a challenging position. We take this matter seriously and have taken immediate steps to ensure this type of situation will not happen again. The NAIA is committed to the student-athlete experience.”

Ulibarri’s group, she said, waited approximately 30 minutes to hit their tee shots at 5. When Ulibarri’s time finally came, she blocked a 3-wood into a tree on the right side of the fairway. Her ball deflected off a branch and into a penalty area from where Ulibarri took a drop and then played her third shot back into the left side of the fairway about 190 yards from the green. Her fourth shot came up just short and right of the green, leaving her a short chip to the treacherous pin.

With a pitching wedge, she bumped her ball up to the hole then fast-walked after it, eager to get a mark down the moment her ball came to rest atop the slope. But it never did come to rest, instead trundling back to roughly the same spot from where she had just played. For Ulibarri’s sixth swipe, out came her putter. Same result. Shot 7: another putt attempt. “Really firm,” is how Ulibarri recalls striking that ball. “It just barely stopped above the hole and so then I just marked it really quick and tapped it in.”

Ulibarri did her best to push the messiness out of her mind and carried on with her round, later signing for a five-over 77.  After confirming her scores and inking her card, she convened with her parents, Allen and Angie, who had walked the round with their daughter. Angie told Hannah that as she had watched her navigate the 5th green, she was praying for a positive result. “It was a very unconventional pin placement,” Hannah said. “But we kind of figured everyone’s got to play the same pin. You just got to make do with it.”

They left the course and returned to their hotel. That evening, before heading out for dinner, Hannah showered and used the few moments of solitude to think through her round and where she might be able to save shots the next day. “And so I thought about that hole,” she said of the 5th. The drive, the drop, the shot back to the fairway, the approach, the chip, the putt, the second putt, the tap in. The ugly 7 she had penciled on her card. The…wait a minute…seven? Hannah counted up her shots again. Then again. And again. “I counted probably 10 different times,” she said. “And then I realized, like, Oh my goodness, I’m gonna have to call myself in.”

***

WHEN HANNAH WAS GROWING UP in Orange County, Calif., her father first started taking her to the range when she was about 6 years old. She remembers being drawn to the facility less by the promise of hitting golf balls than downing hot dogs. “A little fun thing for me and him to do,” she said.

By 9, though, Hannah was showing an aptitude for the game. She began taking lessons and attending golf camps and soon was a rising talent in the SoCal junior ranks. At Troy High School, in Fullerton, she starred on the golf team. As she looked ahead to college, she knew she wanted to play golf, study engineering and computer science and stay in state. Hannah’s Christian faith is also paramount to her, so when the golf coach from a small Christian institution called The Master’s University expressed interest in Hannah playing for his team, she perked up. Then she visited the campus. She loved it. She had found her home for the next four years.

“Freshman year was a good year for me,” she said. Her rigorous course load at Troy HS had prepped her well, as had her high school golf program. In her debut season at Master’s, she won a tournament, the Redhawk Rumble, and went on to be named to the Golden State Athletic Conference’s all-conference team, an honor she also claimed in her sophomore and junior years. Her primary goal each season, though, was earning an invite to the NAIA national championship, which she has achieved in each of her first three years. Her runner-up finish as a freshman in the national championship emboldened her, but a year later, at the tail end of what she calls her “sophomore slump,” she shot 17 over in the first two rounds and didn’t sniff the cut.

This year, she came in sharper — she’d won twice this season and had six other top-5 finishes — and burning with determination. “I was really kind of seeing this as my year to just make up for what happened last year,” she said. “I did have pretty high hopes. I felt pretty good about my swing, my putting felt very solid, chipping was solid.”

In her practice rounds at Eagle Crest, she was struck by the course’s lush beauty; it reminded her of TPC Deere Run, in Illinois, the national championship site in her freshman and sophomore years. The slickness of the greens also caught her attention. “I was a little bit surprised at how fast they were, but I actually prefer fast greens,” she said. “But, yeah, overall, I was really pleased with the course. I was just very excited to get to compete there.”

***

AFTER HANNAH HAD SHOWERED and dressed in her hotel room, she dropped by her parents’ room to alert them of her accounting error. “At this point, I was like, okay, maybe I’m just going crazy,” she said. Between her own bevy of strokes and her partners’ — one of whom had four- or five-putted — her head was spinning.

“It’s never happened to me before; I’m generally pretty on top of things,” she said.

She and her father tallied the strokes together.

“He was also having a hard time remembering just because of all the putting that was going on,” she said. “My mom was kind of having the same problem.”

For a fourth opinion, they called one of the coaches who had been walking with the group. He, too, was unsure. When a second coach who’d been with the group didn’t answer his phone, Hannah tried one of her playing partners. “She remembered all my putts for sure,” Hannah said. That was all the confirmation Hannah needed. “I realized like, all right, well, that was my mistake so I’m gonna have to call it in. As much as I didn’t want to do it at the end of the day, it’s what I gotta do.”

Hannah’s next call was to the tournament director, who asked her to read back all of her scores to him.

“I said, ‘Number 5, I know I said I had a 7, but I know for sure now, I got an 8.’”

The tournament director handed his phone to the rules official.

“Are you 100 percent sure? Because you know you’ll end up getting disqualified?”

I said, “Yeah, I’m 100 percent sure.”

The officals’ sympathy was not lost on Hannah.

“I could tell that they were trying to give me a chance to really think about it,” she said. “They offered to let me call one of my [walking] scorers, who I had already called before.”

The issue with the 5th green, though, she said, was not broached.

“They didn’t explicitly say anything about the hole, but I think, you know, maybe there was some sorrow.”

***

ONE OF THE THINGS ABOUT GOLF that many non-golfers struggle to wrap their heads around is that the accuracy of the scores on the card ultimately are the responsibility of one person and only one person: the golfer who made those scores.

That’s true in weekend four-balls, in amateur and college events, all the way up to the thin-air heights of the PGA and LPGA tours. Your score is your duty. Your signature is your word. Hannah could have squashed the lingering doubts in her head. She could have played on the next day. She could have made the eight-over cut. Who knows, she could have won. Hannah did none of those things. Does she deserve a medal for her integrity? She does not, nor is she seeking one. Should she feel frustrated or angered by the unusual circumstances that led to her disqualification? That would be understandable, but she said she feels neither of those emotions.

“I’ve never really necessarily felt annoyed by it,” she said. “Again, everybody had to deal with it, and it’s my job as the player to keep my score.” She added, “At the end of the day, it’s mostly just disappointment in myself.”

As Hannah came to grips with her unceremonious exit from the national championship that Wednesday evening, you couldn’t have blamed her for wanting to hop the first flight back to the West Coast. She didn’t. The next morning, she returned to Eagle Crest to support one of her friends who was in the field.

“Harder than I thought when I was first there,” Hannah said.

But as she walked the first few holes and replayed the events of the last 24 hours in her head, a peace came over her, she said. A contentment fueled by the realization of, You know what? I did the right thing.