The Hillsdale men’s golf team placed 12th at the 36-hole Music City Invitational in Nashville, Tennessee, Monday and Tuesday.

“Early on, when things didn’t go our way, we just kind of let one bad decision or one bad shot affect the next one,” head coach Matt Thompson said. “I think that’s really the only way to explain a performance like that is when you just let one bad shot turn into two, turn into three, and so on.”

Thompson said the team expected to place higher going into the tournament.

“It was a tough week,” Thompson said. “On Sunday in our practice round everybody was in pretty good form. I felt like everyone was in a pretty good spot, to be honest. We had two-out-of-three pretty good rounds in Kentucky the week before so I felt like we were on the right track and then everything just kind of fell apart.”

Senior Darragh Monaghan shot 72-73=145, finishing one-over-par and tying for 12th with eight other players.

“I still think he’s trying to get back into the form he was at in the fall,” Thompson said. “But credit to him, he was one who was able to just grind it out and fight through some of the things that he was battling with his swing.”

Monaghan had eight birdies to finish one-over-par over the two rounds.

“He was able to put together a respectable performance,” Thompson said. “It was good to see from him.”

Sophomore Filippo Reale and senior Drew Gandy carded the same 74-79 score, shooting 153 in the tournament and finishing tied for 47th. Senior Gerry Jones Jr. shot a 79+75=154 and finished 55th.

Jones said the team was disappointed in its performance.

“We all played pretty poorly, except Darragh – he played pretty solid the whole tournament,” Jones said. “The other four of us were pretty inconsistent with getting anything going, which is kind of a shame. We’ve typically played pretty well at this course in the past. So to play the way we did as a team, we were all pretty upset.”

Jones said he was hurt most by his long game.

“It was nothing great,” Jones said. “Definitely a lot of improvements I can make mainly off the tee with my driver. I started to figure out towards the middle of the second round what it was and I started hitting that better but my putting was pretty inconsistent. I would make some good birdie putts, and then just give it away on the next hole with a three-putt.”

The Chargers will travel to Purgatory Golf Club in Noblesville, Indiana, Monday and Tuesday to finish up regular season play at the Ken Partridge Invitational.

“We’ll figure things out and then go back on the road,” Thompson said. “We just have to do a better job of kind of keeping our emotions out of it.”

Jones said the course can live up to its name depending on the conditions.

“There are not many trees at all, it’s actually very wide open,” Jones said. “What makes that course pretty difficult is it can get very windy out there because there’s nothing blocking the wind. I played there in my sophomore year and it was extremely brutal. It felt like you were in purgatory.”