Family, on and off the course, fuels C-USA Champion Barnard
The 2022 Individual medalist started the game thanks to his late grandfather, an MTSU golfer
Sam Doughton, MT Athletics
7/23/2022
MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — Michael Barnard had just finished lunch when he was told to go to the driving range.
There are benefits, perhaps, to an early tee time in competitive play. And with Barnard’s start time of 8:40 a.m. on the third and final round of stroke play at the 2022 Conference USA Championships, the redshirt junior found himself atop the individual leaderboard as the other crop of leaders, with a 10:00 tee time, made their way up their final few holes.
Less pressure on the Hendersonville, Tenn. Native down the stretch, to be sure, but that also meant he might not be as fresh in the event someone caught his -6 score that currently led the field at Texarkana Country Club and forced a playoff. So, his assistant coach, Cody Proveaux, sent him to the range to get ready.
“Golf, everyone says it's individual,” Barnard said. “But when coaches help you out, it's very beneficial, especially when they are giving you good things to think about.”
Warming up in case of a playoff is a smart thing for a coach to remind a golfer to do. There was one issue in this case, however. The final group with a player in range of Barnard, Florida Atlantic’s Max Sturdza, who was just one shot back, was making its way to the 18th tee.
And Barnard, equipped with his range finder on his bag, couldn’t help himself.
“My mom was standing over there, asking what was going on, and I was like 'give me a second.’” Barnard recalled.
A familiar sight to many associated with Blue Raider golf since Barnard joined the team in the fall of 2019, the young golfer with a member of his family by his side after a round. This day, it’s his mom Julie, a former golfer at Vanderbilt. Others, it’s his dad Corey, a former PGA Professional. Even his grandmother, Julie’s mom Gail Scott, is at any tournament where she can get a cart and keep score.
But the one person that used to be there at almost any tournament Michael played in, the other Blue Raider in the Barnard family, others couldn’t see. His grandfather, Billy Scott, “Boots” as he was known to family and friends. A former Blue Raider golfer himself, who was once a member of the 1961 MTSU team.
We’ll come back to the driving range in a bit, shortly after Sturdza takes his final tee shot of the round.
For now, we’re further back in time, when Michael Barnard first stepped onto the putting green at Bluegrass Yacht and Golf Club in Hendersonville, Tenn. Where he’d accompanied Boots, or Pops, as Michael called him, onto the course whenever he got the chance.
“(Pops) said I used to run around that thing and putt for hours and hours,” Michael said. “Nothing would stop me. I'd run around every hole and hit the ball at everything, I think I was six or seven.”
It was an easy arrangement, Julie Barnard said, to have Michael go to the course so often when he was young. With both of her parents retired, they could easily pick Michael up after school or take him there on the weekends when his parents couldn’t.
“I always say I can count on one hand the things that my parents have missed that Michael has done,” Julie said. “My dad actually retired from teaching the day Michael was born. It was just a given that 'Hey, if you can't take him, we'll take him.'”
Michael started playing competitively around when he was eight or nine years old, playing in “Micro” division tournaments put on by the Tennessee Golf Association. And with the help of his golf-loving family, he developed a love for the game too, alongside playing basketball and soccer in between his summers spent on the Bluegrass fairways.
“Obviously it was fun to play with my grandpa all the time, and my family loved it,” Michael said. “But also, I just love going out there. Every day, going to the course, in golf, there's that one thing that you'll do that will bring you back the next day, whether it's good or bad. I just loved that.”
His mom thought that soccer might be the sport that held Michael’s interests the longest, as he quickly moved up teams at Tennessee United, the local soccer club. Finding success in a sport other than golf wouldn’t have been unusual for their family either, as Boots was a DuPont Hall of Famer as a basketball player at DuPont High School and later coached basketball at Beech High School from 1980-2000, eventually getting inducted into the Beech High School Athletic Hall of Fame in 2016.
But Michael found success on the links and eventually started to get interest from college programs. He committed to MTSU initially, but when the Blue Raiders’ coach, Brennan Webb, was hired as the head coach at UT-Knoxville, Barnard followed him.
“We had never even looked at Tennessee,” Julie said. “Literally the day that we moved in was the first time we had even seen the campus.”
Michael loved golf as a Volunteer, Julie said. Loved playing for Coach Webb and loved his teammates. But it quickly became apparent that UT-Knoxville just wasn’t a great fit as a school for Michael Barnard. So when he reached out to Webb’s replacement in Murfreesboro, Mark McEntire, the transition back home, just an hour’s drive away from Hendersonville, Michael becoming a Blue Raider was easy.
The move to Murfreesboro had another benefit beyond just a change of scenery, however. In Michael’s final few months of high school, his Pops had gotten sick. The diagnosis came in February 2018: pancreatic cancer. One of the toughest cancers to fight back from.
Still, the early treatments went well. The tumor was removed, and Boots got to watch Michael play at the 2018 PGA Junior at Valhalla Country Club in Louisville, Ky.
“Dad got out there, and he had never met a stranger,” Julie said. “And I'll never forget someone was like 'You're moving pretty good!' and he was like 'And I just had chemo this week too!'”
Still, the chemo took its toll, and the cancer eventually returned. But only being an hour away from home, Michael was able to visit whenever he could.
“It was like a blessing from God,” Julie said. “Had he been in Knoxville, especially with golf, he wouldn't have been able to come home. Being so close, he was able to come back and forth and spend time with my dad that he never would've been able to do.”
Billy “Boots” Scott passed away on October 15, 2019, during Michael’s first semester at MTSU. He was 77 years old. Just a week prior during MTSU’s home tournament that fall, the team wore purple ribbons, the color for Pancreatic Cancer research, on their hats during the Intercollegiate at the Grove.
“I loved him being around, spending time with him and him coming out to the course,” Michael said. “It's things you've got to deal with in life. I hated it, I still hate it to this day. I wish it'd have never happened. But I know he's in a better place.”
Before Boots passed, his daughter Julie noted, he did get the chance to let Michael know how excited he was to see him playing for Pops’ alma mater.
“Dad was just proud of him regardless,” Julie said. “Michael was like 'Do you think Pops is going to be mad that I'm leaving Tennessee and going to Middle?' And I said 'Absolutely not! He wants you to do what's going to make you happy.'”
It perhaps was another gift that Michael’s redshirt freshman campaign was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He got his feet underneath him at Middle, but also time to reflect, a summer at his house on the Bluegrass Club course to get better. And let his natural strengths as a golfer lead him into MTSU’s 2020-21 season.
“The thing that I'll always admire and remember the most about Mike is that he always stays even keeled,” head coach Mark McEntire said. “He does a really nice job of staying in the moment and not letting things affect him.”
That year’s team was a veteran-laden one, with two graduate students in Tanner Owens and Connor McKay helping lead the way through an up-and-down spring heading into the conference tournament. The Blue Raiders had won their first two tournaments that spring but finished no better than seventh in any other tournament that season ahead of the conference championship.
Things didn’t start great for the Blue Raiders, holding in 10th place as a team after the first day of competition. But a 21-stroke improvement from the first round to the second as a team skyrocketed MTSU to first on the leader board, a position it held through stroke play, setting up a two-day match play tournament for the C-USA title.
“Match play is a different beast,” McEntire said. “The most competitive and mentally strong person perseveres in match play. And I think Mike's attitude really helped him.”
Michael was the first Blue Raider off the course each of the two matches, taking his point 3&2 against Charlotte in the semifinals, and then dominating with a 5&2 performance over North Texas for the conference title, helping lead MTSU to their third-straight C-USA crown as a program.
“For the first two rounds (of the 2021 C-USA Championship), I was really nonexistent,” Michael said. “I was sort of chilling, walking around the course. But when match play came around, everyone was so confident going into that, and it all just fell into place.
“It brings out the competitive side of you. It's so much fun, because you don't have to worry about 'Well, if I make an eight there, my score is ruined.' If you make an eight there, it's whatever, just move onto the next hole.”
That match play performance was one of many that showcased Michael’s potential to McEntire, alongside personal accolades like his qualification for the US Amateur at Oakmont in the summer of 2021.
Which is why McEntire was so disappointed with Barnard’s first tournament of the fall at the Island Resort Intercollegiate. Michael had shot OK relative to his peers, finishing tied for 21st at eight-over-par with a host of other golfers as MTSU tied for fourth as a team. But breaking down the stats revealed an issue McEntire wanted to bring to his attention.
The reigning US Amateur Champion, James Piot of Michigan State, was in the field of this tournament. As one might expect, he shot the ball pretty well, tying for first at the end of the tournament a 7-under-par. Pilot had 12 birdies across three rounds, Michael had 11. And yet, Michael finished 15 shots back, despite possessing as much firepower as one of the best amateur players in the country.
“For us to get to where we wanted to go, he had to stop doing a couple of things,” McEntire said.
Michael’s distance off the tee is pro-ready as is, McEntire says. Which means that on just Par 5s, Michael stands a good chance of setting himself two or three shots under par every single round just due to his long drives. That’s a huge weapon for any golfer, let alone a collegiate one, to have. But to take full advantage of that, Michael had to play smart the rest of the way. Not be a hero on the Par 3s, have a good game plan on the Par 4s. That wasn’t necessarily happening.
McEntire doesn’t have a ton of buttons to press with his golfers that other coaches in other sports might use to get his players’ attention. Sprints, other conditioning drills, they’re not really a thing in golf. But he can take away playing time, which is what he did for the Blue Raiders’ next tournament at Louisiana Tech.
Michael wasn’t happy with that demotion. McEntire even concedes it might’ve cost MTSU a regional bid, given the Blue Raiders finished the event 15th, which hurt their overall team ranking a fair bit. But Michael also got the message.
“I've just kind of grown up in the game,” Michael said of this year. “I'll get out there and if I put myself in a bad spot, I don't try to do something stupid to get out it. It's really just thinking myself better through the course, that you don't have to force it a lot of the time.”
Michael finished the fall on a roll, finishing second and fifth at the Blue Raiders final two events of the semester.
Which brings us back to Texarkana, on the driving range, as Michael tried to hone in on FAU’s Max Sturdza’s drive on 18.
Michael peered through the lens, though the sounds from the fairway told just as much of the story. Sturdza’s drive had found the trees. It’d be a tricky up-down, at best, for him to even have a shot at the birdie to tie.
The FAU golfer played it safe, laying up short of the green. And when the approach shot that followed didn’t hole out, Michael Barnard was the 2022 C-USA Individual men’s golf champion.
It wasn’t a perfect tournament for Michael. McEntire noted that Mike would tell you himself he didn’t strike the ball his best. But he caught on fire from the green, built off of confidence from a putting lesson the team had the week before. And in golf, sometimes that little bit of confidence is all you need.
“At this level, it's something small,” McEntire said. “The difference between a guy on the PGA Tour and a guy on the Korn Ferry Tour is a putt.”
Michael finished the tournament 7-under-par, leading the field in scoring on both the Par 4s and the Par 5s. But what he remembered most was having a chance to put his team in contention for match play on his final hole of the day, and just missing a birdie putt that would’ve put MTSU in the Top 4. Which, at that point, anything could’ve happened in the match play that followed.
So as he travels this summer, working on his short game to complement his driving ability, the team that surrounds him at Middle, both on and off the course, both in and out of Murfreesboro. And both still here on earth, and in Pops’ case, up above, keeps him motivated to keep getting better.
“I think we're going to have a really good team next year,” Michael said. “If all the things come together, it can be one of the best years in program history. There's no reason why we couldn't make it to the national championship as a team.”
