Fred Warren	- Download MP3-

Fred Warren and Richard Sykes have combined to witness millions of golf shots, thousands of golfers, hundreds of champions and the evolution of today’s college game.

The improvement of the game started long before Tiger Woods won the 1996 national championship at The Honors Course. Neither Warren or Sykes knows the specific period, but they know it’s a better game today than it was 25 years ago.

“The game has improved so much that it’s unbelievable,” said the 63-year-old Sykes, who is in his 37th year coaching at North Carolina State. “The players are just better. You have fitness, better courses, filming — and the coaches are better. They’re athletes.

“Golfers used to be short fat guys like me.”

Sykes remembers when the ACC championship consisted of teams playing seven golfers with the top five scores counting. Wake Forest almost always won.

“They haven’t won since like 1989,” Sykes said. “It doesn’t show how much they’ve gone down; it shows how there are many teams that are much better.

“Your old No. 1 guy would barely make today’s team.”

And back when Warren started his career as an assistant coach at Oklahoma State, only a handful of teams were capable of winning the NCAA championship — and that was before the NCAA held regional tournaments. But his TCU women’s team captured a national title in 1983.

“There were maybe five or six that had a shot,” said the 56-year-old Warren, who is in his 22nd season at East Tennessee State. “Now there’s probably 30 teams that could do it.

“The parity and number of good programs has exploded over the years, and that’s a great thing.”

But their jobs haven’t changed much: Get players you want, develop them and build the program. They’ve changed little. But the golfers have changed quite a bit.

“You have to adapt to young people,” Sykes said. “They’ve changed more than the coaches. I remember when we all had a hospitality suite and you couldn’t give advice on the course.

“Now the young coaches work a lot on recruiting, and a lot of them have been professional players. They’ve really improved the game.”

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