Owls Championship Week Closes with Two Titles

Kennesaw State knocked out two birds with one stone this week at the 2011 Atlantic Sun Men’s Golf Championship.

The Owls’ Jeff Karlsson carded a 6-under 207 to give Kennesaw State its first A-Sun individual medalist, while teammate Matt Nagy added a 3-under performance to join Karlsson on the All-Tournament team and lead the Owls to their first A-Sun Men’s Golf team title.

For a program whose previous best team performance came in 2008 with a tie for third and in the same year posted their best individual finish with Oliver West taking third these wins represent big steps0 for the Owls program.

“Words can’t really describe how awesome this is for our players, program and school to take away two trophies and for Jeff Karlsson being the medalist,” Owls head coach Jay Moseley stated. “It really shows the work that we have put into this program and how much we have improved over the last couple years.”

For a team that loses only one senior, Chad Wilson, the future looks bright for the Owls to claim back-to-back team titles next year when the tournament is once again held at Chateau Elan.

“Our program is in great shape right now, the guys are working hard and they just want to keep getting better,” Moseley added. “That has been our motto all year long, but we still have work to do but we feel like this team can go a long way and we are excited about the future of the program and encouraged by our performance this week.”

Karlsson entered the day with a one-shot lead over Belmont’s Daniel Smith and learned that he earned earned a spot on the European Team for the Palmer Cup, the amateur version of the Ryder Cup, which is set to be played from June 9th – 11th at the Stanwich Club outside Greenwich, Conn.

The pressure of being the leader going into the final day as well as earning such a high honor with Palmer Cup didn’t shake Karlsson and the Owls as he claimed two individual honors and helped the Owls to four tournament titles prior to the conference championship.

“We started out the season by winning a lot of tournaments so coming into the conference championship we knew that we could do this and we could win so having those wins prior to the tournament was really huge,” Karlsson added of the team’s win.