The 2022-2023 Valparaiso University men’s golf season has featured a sense of excitement from the time the season’s first event teed off in early September.

Now, that excitement will reach its highest point yet as Valpo gets set to compete in the Missouri Valley Conference Championship, a three-day, 54-hole event that will begin on Sunday at the par-71, 6760-yard Oakwood Country Club in Coal Valley, Ill.

The Beacons, who finished as the team runner-up at last year’s conference championship, have great reason for optimism heading into this year’s event, as they enter the weekend with a conference-best team scoring average of 290.13. Head coach Dave Gring’s team enters the championship with significant momentum after finishing as the team runner-up at Penn State’s Rutherford Intercollegiate, just one stroke behind the host Nittany Lions, who won their home tournament for an eighth straight season.

“Our team is excited to compete in this year’s championship,” Gring said. “It’s a crescendo to the entire golf season and every team works toward it throughout the year. One area that we can completely control is our preparation, and our guys have done an awesome job all spring preparing for this tournament. Our preparation includes playing in other spring tournaments leading up to the championship. It also includes steady workouts each week with our strength and conditioning coach, meeting with training personnel when necessary and consistent TPI stretches and workouts along with a good diet, drinking plenty of water and getting the necessary rest. All of this sounds really simple on paper, but our guys show discipline in their activities and they will be ready to compete.”

Valpo possesses a .744 winning percentage (99-34) in 2022-23 and is in position to shatter a modern program record for single-season team scoring average. The Beacons have finished in the top three on the team leaderboard in six of their 10 tournaments this season. The squad will take the course for a practice round on Saturday before the championship begins in earnest on Sunday.

“The practice round on Saturday will be the first time that any of us will have seen the course,” Gring said. “We have done our course review on Google Earth and we have a good game plan coming into the championship. The golf course is not particularly long at all, but the holes are tight and tree-lined pretty well. We are going to have to be very sharp off the tee, hitting fairways and giving ourselves clear shots to the greens in regulation. The golf course is pretty flat, with its ‘parkland design/layout,’ so we don’t have a lot of changes in elevation, hitting up or down to the greens. We anticipate the green speeds to be fast and we will get a good gauge of that in the practice round. The green complexes are challenging on some holes and pretty straight forward on others. The three Par 5s will give us great scoring opportunities and we’re going to need to play the Par 3s as close to par as possible.”

The Valpo lineup boasts the top two scoring averages in the conference and three of the top 10. Senior Caleb VanArragon (Blaine, Minn. / Blaine) leads The Valley with a 70.90 scoring average, while sophomore Anthony Delisanti (Sanborn, N.Y. / Niagara Wheatfield) – the defending MVC Championship medalist – is second at 71.47. Yianni Kostouros (Crown Point, Ind. / Crown Point [Ball State]) is the third Beacon in the league’s top 10 with a scoring average of 73.70.

“This will certainly be a good test for us,” Gring said. “We have played a wide variety of golf courses throughout the year and we are going to need to show up and play some really good golf. The team is playing some of its best golf all year at this time, so we will welcome the challenge and look forward to a great competition.”

A link to live scoring via GolfStat is available on ValpoAthletics.com.