Jackson Koivun knew the drill. He grabbed the sticker displaying his name, walked over to the wooden leaderboard at Sea Island Golf Club and slapped it at the bottom of the list of SEC champions, right below his previous two stickers.
The Auburn junior became just the second player ever to win three consecutive SEC individual titles – and the first to do so since LSU’s BR McLendon in 1967. In the process, Koivun posted a championship-record score of 19-under 191, a whopping seven shots better than runner-up Jase Summy of Oklahoma.
Koivun’s 191 total marked the second time this spring that he’d recorded the third-best 54-hole score, also firing 25 under at the Amer Ari Invitational, one of his six wins in eight spring starts.
“Nothing surprises me with this kid,” Auburn head coach Nick Clinard said. “He’s really special. This means a lot to him. He was very motivated coming in here to win three in a row.”
Added Koivun: “It’s good to put my name down in the history books.”
As a team, Auburn grabbed the No. 1 seed for match play, which begins with the quarterfinals on Saturday at the Seaside Course, which annually hosts the PGA Tour. Koivun already owns a PGA Tour card via PGA Tour University Accelerated and can activate it either this summer or next.
The Tigers finished six shots better than Florida. Texas, Ole Miss, Texas A&M, Mississippi State, Oklahoma and Arkansas round out the eight match-play qualifiers. The Razorbacks won a playoff over South Carolina and Georgia. Four top-20 programs – No. 8 LSU, No. 11 Vanderbilt, No. 14 Tennessee and No. 17 Alabama – failed to advance to the knockout stage, though all will qualify for NCAA regionals as at-larges.