The secret weapon languished in the backyard, and yet no one was using it. It was lille having a cutting-edge driver nestled in your golf bag, the only one in the world, and instead teeing off with your partner’s rusted 7-iron.
This, of course, astonished Coach Bowen Sargent. So when he took over the Virginia men’s golf program in September 2004, he set out to remedy it. He only had three days from starting his new job until the first tournament of the season. It made for a tight agenda.
Still, he cleared space for a phone call.
Forgive the under-utilized weapon himself, Dr. Bob Rotella, if that call has since escaped his memory. Rotella, the renowned sports psychologist who lives just outside Charlottesville and spent more than two decades heading up Virginia’s sports psychology department, has received so many other calls over the years — calls from elite golfers, athletes, artists, from Rory McIlroy last month as the Odyssean golfer navigated his way to a Masters title — that this one must have gotten lost at some point.
“I don’t remember anything,” Rotella said in an interview last week, laughing.
Sargent does. He remembers it as the moment that gave his team an instant leg up over the other kids on the block. The psychologist down the road became a regular consultant, and the program has been using it ever since to bolster its mindset, all the way through a program-best postseason that ended May 28.
“We wouldn’t be in the position that we’re in without the help that he’s given us over the 20 years,” Sargent said in an interview.
Sports psychology, a burgeoning field bent on developing the mental side of the game in order to maximize the physical side, has taken special root in golf. It’s a sport that is won and lost, the modern player will tell you, between the ears.
“They spend a lot of time visualizing,” Rotella said of the team, “and seeing what they want and talking about it and being as honest about it as possible. It's basically, you're going to get up every day, have a great state of mind and a great mood and say, when I get on that golf course, I got to feel like I own the world.”
The week of the NCAA Championships, the team gathered with Rotella, meetings that have been a three-or-four times a year staple since the first week of Sargent’s tenure. For an hour and a half, he gave the players the rundown, going over the plan, drilling belief into them.
“Do you have the will to do this?” Rotella said. “Are you going to dig deep down inside, and look inside, and admit to yourself that you’re really good at golf?”
Rotella’s messaging never changes. It deals with a player’s self-belief system, and their routines, and what they’re thinking on the course. He has endless stories that players can relate to, Sargent said, like valuable inventory stored on racks.
Free will is his central tenet, the idea that people can control the way their minds work. The players had to believe.
“Are you willing,” Rotella asked the team, “to see yourself as being the best player in the country, as good as anybody else?”
Whether it necessarily clicked this season or sometime before that, Rotella is not sure. He shrugs off the notion that he may have noticed anything out of the ordinary leading up the tournament, any signs that this team figured it out between the ears.
Sargent is also skeptical that something fundamental changed this year.
“I don’t know that anything new happened this year,” Sargent said. “I think we have probably an older group. This group has been together now for three years, and I think they’ve heard his message.”
But believing became easier as the postseason went along, the classic snowball effect. First came winning the ACC Championships. Then came advancing past the match play quarterfinals at the NCAA Championships, past the semifinals. All things the program had never done. Even before the match play era started in 2009, it never finished as highly as second at the NCAA Championships, its resting place after falling in the final.
A couple things certainly buttressed the team on the psychological side. College golf is a team sport, Rotella believes. Only in the sport’s college version is that truly the case, where the mission is to try lassoing together a group of guys whose life has been committed to improving themselves.
Senior Deven Patel did not make a single swing in match play. He was supposed to play, to be one of the team’s five. But he struggled in stroke play and lost his spot. Later, though, there he was, popping up on the television screen, urging his teammates on at every opportunity.
That support proved enormous, and it went deeper.
“They had a bunch of guys who were all saying, ‘Hey, this is possible. Let’s all be committed,’” Rotella said. “And it’s a lot easier when everybody has the same level of discipline, dedication.”
That dedication came from the top. Junior Ben James, the third-ranked amateur in the world, displayed his characteristic leadership during the tournament.
“He’s probably the highest ranked,” Rotella said. “And the fact that he’s very unselfish, willing to really be helpful to the other guys, probably helps a lot.”
The teachings are everywhere — in Rotella's dozen-plus books and talked about after one of his clients wins a major championship for roughly the 80th time.
However, for Rotella, the mission is harder at Virginia. Since 2004, he has been trying to help the players improve on the course and manage the demands of life at a top school.
Other teams, he says, are out on the course while his players are in the classroom. That is a daily hurdle to clear. Part of it is about compartmentalizing. Part of it is about having the attitude, having the dreams, holding yourself accountable every day.
The psychologist is “probably the greatest single common denominator between successful golfers than any other teacher or workout guy or chipping or putting,” Sargent said. Virginia’s golfers have access to him whenever they want.
Sometimes he meets the team at his house. Sometimes he pops over to the team’s facility. His best work comes on an individual basis, over text or the phone, when he can go beyond his broad principles. Rarely, if putting or pitching or something specific is really ailing a player, he might make a trip to the course.
No matter the form, he has been there, that secret weapon in the backyard, for more than two decades now. Always the imperative has been the same.
“We're basically chasing dreams and chasing greatness,” Rotella said. “And it takes quite a commitment, both physically and mentally and emotionally.”
Greatness? This season Virginia touched it.
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