When Will Baker was 13 and playing on the Southeastern Junior Golf Tour, he shot a 67 at the University of Georgia Golf Course, just about a 15-mile drive from where he grew up in nearby Statham, Georgia, for his first round ever in the 60s.
“At that time there was no live scoring, so I watched (a) kid kind of hug his parents, thought he won,” Baker recalled on Tuesday. “I was like, ‘Eh, sorry.’ That was pretty fun, yeah.”
Eight years later, he’ll head back home as a member of the Kansas men’s golf team as the Jayhawks begin play in the Athens Regional on Monday. It’s the 10th straight year that KU has made a regional, but the first of Baker’s career; he started out playing only sparingly at Clemson in five tournaments in two seasons.
“He’s one of those guys that he’s like training a racehorse,” KU coach Jamie Bermel said. “You get him going and he can go low. He has that ability. I think my biggest concern with Will Baker this week is don’t try too hard. Because there’s some schools down there that passed on him. So if we can get him going early, the kid, he goes on confidence.”
Baker compiled a 71.2-stroke per-round average in nine events during the regular season. That made him third best on the team after senior Will King and sophomore UC Riverside transfer Hartej Grewal.
He had to work hard to get to that point.
Baker is a unique golfer, Bermel says. He plays with a 10-finger grip, or “baseball grip,” “and kind of has this funky grip on his putter, but he can play.”
He certainly had plenty of buzz entering college. As a high schooler playing at Lane Creek Golf Club in Bishop, Georgia, he hit a hole-in-one on the par-4 fourth hole on his way to shooting a 61, a performance that earned national attention.
“I’ve had some good days for sure,” he said.
But after a couple of fallow years at Clemson, when he entered the portal last offseason he had no tournaments to play in and no schools to call and essentially had to demonstrate to the world at large that he was worth taking: “And so it’s kind of nice having a slight chip on my shoulder when I see half the teams in the tournament that didn’t respond to me, and we beat them in Indiana (at the Hoosier Collegiate in April), and stuff like that.”
“Will Baker was about an opportunity,” Bermel added. “He thought he deserved one where he was at, at Clemson, and didn’t really get it for whatever reason. But you know, what we always say in the transfer portal, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and he’s been a good one.”
In addition, not long ago he was dealing with the “full-blown yips,” as he puts it. He was struggling with putting and turned in a “terrible” showing his first event of the season.
“I don’t really know how you fix that, you just kind of have to keep working, keep working,” he said. “You can’t really hit it close enough, unless you hole it, when you have the yips.”
He spent hours on putting and tried “almost everything.”
“You kind of just have to trust that you’re good enough to come back from it, and I have, and so I’m super excited now,” Baker said. “There’s nerves, but there’s confidence that I can do what I used to and that I can perform.”
After sitting out two events in September, Baker worked his way back into action. At the Quail Valley Invitational in October, KU took third place as a team at 26-under, a stroke behind Florida Gulf Coast and two behind Memphis. It could have used Baker, who competed as an individual and finished tied for second at 13-under, which would have been the best score by a Jayhawk that day.
He went on to record two top-five finishes in March and came in 19th as the second-best Jayhawk behind King at the Big 12 Championship.
His next challenge will be going home. As he himself acknowledges, “just because I’ve been there a lot doesn’t mean I’m going to play great.” But the familiarity may well prove to be a boon to him and his teammates.
“I think I’ll be able to help a lot of the guys, kind of knowing where to hit it, where not to,” Baker said. “And just having some knowledge gives me a little bit of comfortability to kind of practice, visualize the shots on the range, kind of see what I need to do, know how to prepare, and yeah, I’m excited.”
“He has way more experience than us on grainy Bermuda grass,” King added. “So he’s helped us with that a lot as we’ve traveled the Southeast so far this year. I’m going to pick his brain about that once we get down there.”
KU is a No. 7 seed in its 13-team regional and will need to slightly exceed that ranking by finishing as one of the top five teams in Athens in order to advance to nationals for the first time since 2022.
“I think we believe we have a chance,” Baker said. “We’ve done well, we’ve played against I think every team but Auburn that’s ranked ahead of us this year, so we’re familiar. We know what we can’t, what we can do.
“Personally, I’m excited. I’ve never played a regional. I (had) never played a Big 12 or a conference championship. So this is a first for me every time from here on out.”
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