Before winning one national title and being on the doorstep of another, Mark Hull started his tenure as the men’s golf coach at Colorado Christian University by asking male students around campus a simple question.
Do you have clubs?
It was the summer of 2004, and Hull had just been hired at the private college in Lakewood. But Hull had only two guys on the roster, an incoming freshman and a returner who had never broke 80 in a tournament. Before he could worry about talent, he needed bodies.
“I got some guys I asked in the residence hall who were like, ‘Oh, that’d be fun to play golf!’ Or like, ‘Yeah, I’m pretty good, I can break 100,’” Hull recalled with a laugh. “I would go, ‘That’s not very good, but we’ll work on it.’
“So that first year, I would stand on the first tee box as the guys were teeing off, and my thoughts were like, ‘Lord, just please let them hit it in the air.’ It was rough.”
The Cougars were the worst team in Division II that season. Now, they’re the best. CCU’s Division II crown last spring was the first national title in any sport for the school, and the first national title won by any Colorado collegiate golf team.
And that was just the warm-up.
As the postseason begins Thursday with regionals in Riverside, Calif., CCU is amid arguably the greatest Division II golf season ever. During the regular season, the No. 1-ranked Cougars won all eight Division II tournaments they entered, and also took second in their lone Division I tournament, the Wyoming Desert Intercollegiate in Palm Desert, Calif.
“With what they’ve accomplished within Division II, it’s certainly unprecedented for a Colorado team,” noted golf writer Gary Baines, who has covered golf in the state for 42 years. “They are doing some crazy, dominant things.”
The trend continued at the RMAC Championships from April 20 to 22 in Boulder City, Nev., where the Cougars made another statement with a team-record 54-hole score of 50-under en route to winning by 24 strokes. With that, CCU improved to 111-0 head-to-head against Division II foes this season. Hull’s inner dialogue at the start of tournaments is now the polar opposite of what it was two decades ago.
“This year, my thoughts on that first tee box are, ‘Well, this is going to be fun,‘” Hull said.
After Hull’s humble beginnings at CCU, the program’s turning point came in 2014, when the Cougars won a title in the National Christian College Athletic Association. That was the start of a four-peat at that fall tournament as CCU competed in both the NCCAA and NCAA Division II each year.
“It was those NCCAA title teams that made me realize, ‘Hey, we might actually be able to do this on the D-II stage,’” Hull said. “But we’re on the smaller side of D-II schools, with around 1,500 traditional undergrads. So it still felt like a bit of a longshot, especially considering schools from the southeast have historically dominated the classification.”
Of the last 40 national champions in Division II men’s golf, 37 have been from the southeast. Two were from California. And one came off Alameda Avenue.
This year, the Cougars’ push for a repeat is led by four of the top six golfers in Division II.
No. 1-ranked Adam Duncan is the headliner. He’s won four tournaments this season with a 68.5 scoring average. Last week, the California native was the only Division II men’s golfer selected to represent the United States in the prestigious Arnold Palmer Cup in June.
Alongside Duncan is No. 2 Sungyeop Cho, No. 3 Sangha Park and No. 6 Xavier Bighaus, while Bradley Mulder is ranked at No. 54 and Peyton Jones is also a key contributor. To put the Cougars’ star power in perspective, their fourth-highest ranked player, Bighaus, would likely be the No. 1 player on every other Division II team in the country. Translating that to a higher level, Bighaus would likely be a top-three player for every Division I team in the country.
So the Cougars are confident, but it’s a confidence that was born out of falling flat on their face two years ago at regionals, when they blew an eight-stroke lead on the final day and missed qualifying for the national tournament by one stroke.
“I think you also have to fail in order to have success,” Duncan said. “That’s where letting that lead at super regionals slip away with a couple of holes to go when I was a sophomore came in.
“That was our team really realizing how good we were, but … our young team wasn’t ready for the moment. We weren’t ready for that kind of pressure. And we didn’t have our goals set to win nationals. Those (internal expectations) changed last season.”
A primary reason for CCU’s status as a premier Division II program over the last two seasons is that the school has become a destination for top golfers in the transfer portal, while simultaneously keeping the talent it already has on the roster. Along the program’s rise, Hull also spurned Division I coaching opportunities to stay in Lakewood.
Cho, a sophomore transfer from Odessa College, was the No. 2-ranked player in junior college last year. Park, a graduate transfer from University of Texas Permian Basin, was the No. 1-ranked player in Division II last year. Park won the RMAC title with a single-round course record of 62, while also setting the three-round program record by posting a 17-under.
Beyond the two South Korean stalwarts, Bighaus’ decision to stay at CCU after testing the transfer portal two years ago speaks to the culture Hull cultivated. The Texas native, who won the individual title at the Division I Wyoming Desert Intercollegiate, turned down a handful of Power 4 offers before last season to stay at CCU.
“That was when I really realized how good I had it here at CCU,” said Bighaus, who also took first at the WWU Invitational this season and won the All-Star Southwest Airlines Showcase with a course record last fall. “My bond with teammates was a big part of that decision, and I knew we were going to be really good. But really, it came down to the fact that the culture at CCU is unmatched.
“Hull gives us a lot of flexibility in our practice plans, how we approach the game. He regularly does individual lunches with players to talk about life, the game, our faith. We are not just a number to him. All that adds up, because we are truly a family here, and when we’re out on the course, we’re playing for our team.”
CCU has never produced a professional player on a major tour, but the Cougars’ top-ranked quartet could change that in the coming years. For now, however, they are focused on polishing off their historic season under the 53-year-old Hull, a former NAIA hooper at Taylor University who also coached college basketball and tennis before finding his perfect fit at CCU.
“We’re not feeling any pressure,” Park said, “other than the excitement of what we can do at the end of this season.”
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