CARLSBAD — UCLA’s bid for its third NCAA men’s golf title came up short.
Jackson Koivun and the top-seeded Auburn Tigers won their second national championship in three years, beating seventh-seeded UCLA, 3-0, on a breezy Wednesday at La Costa Resort.
Auburn won the first three points before the remaining two matches were called after 14 holes had been completed.
A freshman in 2024 when Auburn edged Florida State at La Costa for its first championship, Koivun beat Baylor Larrabee, 4 and 3, in the third of the five matches in possibly his final college event.
A few minutes later, Logan Reilly gave Auburn the decisive third point, outlasting Alex Papayoanou, 1 up, with a par on the par-5 18th in the lead group.
Freshman Jake Albert put the first point on the board for Auburn, beating Tyler Loree, 5 and 3, in the second match.
The final two matches stopped when Reilly wrapped up the victory. Josh Kim of UCLA led Josiah Gilbert 3 up, and Auburn’s Cayden Pope had a 4-up edge over Kyle An.
Koivun has yet to make an announcement about turning professional. The top-ranked amateur in the world, he has a PGA Tour spot waiting after securing a card through the PGA Tour University Accelerated program.
The team title capped a season in which he won won six of 10 starts and took his second Fred Haskins Award as the national player of the year. The three-time first-team All-American has 11 career victories – winning three Southeastern Conference titles.
UCLA previously won titles in 1988 and 2008, but this would have been the Bruins’ first since the NCAA reformatted the tournament to include match play in 2009.
“We got off to a bit of a rough start, I mean, nerves are normal,” UCLA head coach Armen Kirakossian. “This is the first time that our guys have been in the match play portion and the first time that they have been in the national championship finals. We came out a little nervous and gave them some holes early. Against a team like that, you just cannot do that and you can’t get away with it.
“Auburn continued to just play awesome, and I thought our guys were solid. They steadied the ship a little bit. We were keeping some matches close. But eventually, Auburn got on a little bit of a run on seven, eight and 11, where they were just hitting really good shots and really difficult pins. They made birdies on holes that, frankly, people all week were not making birdies on. You just can’t do much about that.”
UCLA’s best finish in 18 years included victories over Texas in the quarterfinals on Tuesday morning and Arizona in the semifinals that afternoon.
Both UCLA and Auburn were playing the course for a sixth consecutive day, with four straight days of stroke play before Tuesday’s day-long affair of match play.