Men's golf: Wadsworth grad Brian Myers, now at Mount Union, has eyes on OAC title

Mount Union junior golfer Brian Myers often thinks back to the end of the 2024 Ohio Athletic Conference Championship and what might have been if not for Mother Nature. The tournament was shortened from 72 holes to 54, with Myers finishing third at 3-over-par 219, two shots behind Michael Keefe of John Carroll and Ian Morgan of Otterbein, who had a two-hole playoff to determine the champion, with Keefe coming out on top. The former Wadsworth standout had been hoping the event would be the perfect end to a season that saw him tie the Mount Union program record with five wins. "I was really looking forward to trying to not just tie the Mount Union record for the year, but actually set a new one with six wins and an OAC championship," Myers said. "I came up short by two strokes with only three rounds, which is a little disappointing." The more disappointing thing just might be how well Myers was playing as the tournament wrapped up. After shooting a 1-over 73 and 2-over 74 in the first two rounds, he fired a 72 in what ended up being the final round. That setback has motivated Myers for this season as he tries to better his finishing position in the OAC Tournament, where he also finished second as a freshman. "I've gotten second and third in the OAC, and the plan is being first," Myers said. "It better be this year, or else I'll be even more hungry going into my senior year." An even hungrier Myers might be a scary thought for opponents seeing as how he has already taken first in two of the three tournaments the Purple Raiders have played this season, being named the OAC Golfer of the Week on Sept. 2 after winning the Wooster Gatorade Collegiate and the OAC co-Golfer of the Week on Sept. 16 following his win at the Mount Union Invitational. Bouncing back from a disappointing end to a season is nothing new for Myers, unfortunately. In his senior year at Wadsworth, the Grizzlies were on pace for one of the best seasons in program history. But after leading in the Suburban League National Conference standings for most of the season, Wadsworth saw its lead slip away into a third-place finish at the event and saw Hudson take the crown. The Grizzlies headed into the Division I district tournament confident but came away with a 10th-place finish. Those two tournaments prepared Myers mentally for college golf. In 13 tournaments as a freshman, Myers won once and had three top-three finishes. "The disappointing finish during my senior year was kind of making me hungry going into college just to keep striving to get better," he said. "I definitely think I was trying to prove a little something." Myers credits his success as a freshman to a work ethic that got more intense once he left Wadsworth and landed in Alliance. "I think what I just started to do is really take it even more and more serious," he said. "I started practicing each day in college. It kind of felt like you have your classes and then you go practice every day in the early afternoon. If you want to get better, you will, and that's exactly what I did. It just kind of gives you more freedom to just work on your game and get that much better." While most local athletes might think of Mount Union as a football school, that's a sport Myers almost wishes he didn't play for the one year he did in high school. After playing his freshman season on the gridiron, it was the links that got his full attention for the next three years as a Grizzly. "It was just a little thing I wanted to try out freshman year," Myers said. "I used to never regret it, but now I kind of go back and forth because if I had that one extra year of golf in high school, I wonder where I could be right now. Maybe I would have gotten recruited more in my junior and senior year and been somewhere else. That's something that I kind of think about all the time." While he can't change that decision, the one thing he thinks about that he can do something about is winning the OAC Championship, a goal seemingly in his sights with the way his junior year has started. Contact Ryan Isley at sports@medina-gazette.com.