Moments before Fred Biondi secured the Florida Gators golf program’s fifth national title, coach J.C. Deacon and Ricky Castillo couldn’t contain their emotions.
Deacon and Castillo were walking down the 18th fairway, the match behind Biondi, when it started to look as if their team’s magical run finally would culminate in an NCAA championship.
“I don’t know why, I’m an absolute idiot,” Deacon said. “But I turned to him and said, ‘Dude, when you were 11 years old, I knew this was going to happen to us.’ And both of us started bawling like babies. I’m literally covering my eyes because the camera guy is coming over, Ricky has his sunglasses on … we were going to look like idiots if we lose this match and we’re crying.”
You can excuse the early waterworks, because this was a long time coming.
It was a little more than nine years ago when legendary coach Buddy Alexander retired from his post in Gainesville. In his tenure, the Gators had won two national titles and finished runner-up twice, in addition to earning eight SEC titles. Alexander’s teams, which featured the likes of Chris DiMarco, Brian Gay and Billy Horschel, built upon a proud tradition of excellence that was started when Buster Bishop had the Gator program humming in the late 1960s and early ’70s, a time when Bob Murphy, Steve Melnyk and Gary Koch were roaming the fairways.
But when Deacon, a proud Canadian and the former assistant golf coach at UNLV, took over the Gators in the summer of 2014 for his college head coach debut, he was pressed with retooling a program that had sunk below 80th in the national rankings after a trying 2013-14 campaign. The program was far from being in shambles, but it certainly had lost a step from the era when it was challenging consistently for national titles.
Many were questioning whether Deacon could put the shine back in the program. His first two teams made nationals – which has almost felt like a birthright for UF golf throughout its history – but two of his next three teams could not advance through regionals.
“We’ve always had the talent, but these guys just had to grow up. They’ve committed to doing that the last three years."
J.C. Deacon, Florida head coach
In the spring of 2019, I had dinner with someone who is deeply ingrained in the college golf community. In his opinion, Deacon was on the hot seat and needed to show improvement the following year (which ended up being the pandemic-shortened season) in order to keep his position. It had been a decade since match play was introduced at the NCAA Championship, he noted, and the Gators never had made the final eight teams. In fact, they never really came close.
The program was once in the same conversation as the Oklahoma States and Stanfords of the college golf universe, and now it wasn’t even making nationals.
When would Florida make it back? Would it ever?
The Gators finally did, and it was the recruiting class of 2019 that got them there.
Biondi, Castillo and John DuBois stepped onto campus that fall. Yuxin Lin would transfer from Southern Cal in January of 2021 as a sophomore, meaning that four of the team’s top five players would be seniors at the same time.
In the past four years, Biondi, Castillo and Lin have spent ample time in the top 30 of the World Amateur Golf Ranking. It has been a clearly talented group, on paper one of the best teams in the country.
Castillo, a Californian who knew Deacon from a young age due to Castillo’s brother playing at UNLV, won the Phil Mickelson Award for national freshman of the year in 2020 and eventually starred for the American side in the 2021 Walker Cup, going undefeated. Biondi earned first-team all-America honors as a junior and won three times in his final semester, including an individual NCAA title last Monday.
Lin, a lefty from China, and DuBois, originally a commit to Division II Florida Southern who found his way to Florida at the eleventh hour, improved as time went on and served as consistent bedrocks for the team. Both were first-team all-SEC late in their careers, with DuBois doing so in 2022 when he won the SEC individual crown, and Lin doing so this year.
But before the “core four” could come together to win a national title as a team, they had to battle adversity. Castillo wrestled with expectations and went three years between college victories. Biondi struggled early in his career and had some tough conversations with Deacon about his inability to trust his swing under pressure. It was the fall of 2021 at Isleworth Country Club in Orlando when Deacon ripped into Biondi in front of the team, saying he had never been angrier at a player for lack of focus.
And when assistant coach Dudley Hart – a former Gator and a two-time PGA Tour victor – was hired in September 2021, he pushed hard for a more structured, disciplined environment within the program.
The players fought him on it. Deacon fought him on it.
Everyone eventually bought in and went to work. Some weeks, they looked like a top-five team. Other weeks, they looked as if they didn’t belong with the elite teams in the country.
“We’ve always had the talent, but these guys just had to grow up,” Deacon said. “They’ve committed to doing that the last three years. We took a step last year and got a little bit better, and then they made the ultimate sacrifice to work harder than any team in the country and grow up.”
It led to this spring. At a time when the NBA’s Miami Heat and the NHL’s Florida Panthers have stunned their respective sports by embarking on improbable playoff runs, the Florida Gators golf team built a similar story.
After winning the SEC Championship over Vanderbilt, the Gators looked as if they were going to get stopped at regionals once again as the team was seven strokes out of the fifth and final qualifying spot on the last day. If not for a 66 by Lin, Florida would not have sneaked into the final.
The stroke-play portion of the NCAA Championship turned out to be a breeze, as Biondi earned the program’s third individual title (Bob Murphy in 1966 and Nick Gilliam in 2001 were the other two). When the team grabbed the No. 2 seed, it was the first time the Gators had reached match play at the finals.
“It means more than winning individually. Bringing this home for not just us but the whole Gator nation. … I promised J.C. (Deacon) when I got to school that I would work as hard as I could to try to bring him a ring or two and we did it.”
Fred Biondi
And match play was anything but easy. The Gators had to scrape and claw to beat Virginia in the quarterfinals – Lin rallied from 3 down with seven to play to clinch the 3-2 win – and then were dead in the water against archrival Florida State in the semifinals. The Seminoles had two points in the bank with three matches remaining – two of those matches were tied, and the ’Noles led 2 up with three holes to play in the other.
But Castillo pulled off an epic comeback, ending a three-hole playoff with a big fist pump. The Gators pulled out the other two matches and suddenly were off to meet Georgia Tech in the final.
It couldn’t get much closer, as four of the five matches came down to the end. When DuBois turned a late deficit into a narrow victory and Biondi broke a late tie in his match, it was just enough of an opening for the Gators to reign victorious for the program’s first national title in 23 years.
“It means more than winning individually,” Biondi said of the triumph. “Bringing this home for not just us but the whole Gator nation. … I promised J.C. when I got to school that I would work as hard as I could to try to bring him a ring or two, and we did it.”
The core of this Gators group is gone now. Biondi finished No. 2 in the PGA Tour University Ranking and is starting his professional career this summer rather than remaining amateur to play in next year’s Masters. Castillo (No. 9) and Lin (No. 10) also received Korn Ferry Tour status.
But their professional accomplishments won’t ever feel quite like this. It’s part of why college golf is so special.
“We’re kind of a team of destiny, to be honest,” Deacon said.
One that will live in the history books forever.
E-MAIL SEAN
Top: Fred Biondi wins the NCAA individual title and the clinching point for Florida's team triumph.
CHRISTIAN PETERSEN, GETTY IMAGES