Derek Rende eyed the putt on Council Fire’s No. 5 green Saturday afternoon. Two feet, tops. Almost no break. Slightly downhill.

If this had been Monday evening with the guys instead of the final day of the NCAA East Regional, his playing partners might have called “gimme” and Rende would have had a birdie for his University of Tennessee at Chattanooga golf team.

But there are no gimmes when you’re trying to reach the NCAA championship weekend for the first time in school history. Every stroke matters to you. Every stroke matters to the other 26 teams in the field.

So Rende putted.

And missed.

And angrily tossed his putter.

And softly kicked his bag.

Another chance to help the Mocs advance had disappeared. By the end of Saturday’s play, Rende and his teammates had seen so many chances disappear that they disappeared from the leaderboard’s Top 10 teams. The Mocs tied for 12th, two spots too low to move on.

“I hit the ball well,” Rende said afterward. “But my putting was horrendous. I played a lot better than what I shot.”

It had arguably been the opposite all spring. Under coach Mark Guhne, this young yet gifted quintet of Jonathan Hodge, J.T. Clendenin, Fredrick Qvicker, Ben Rickett and Rende had played magnificently, rising to No. 13 nationally in Golfweek’s May 4 rankings.

“We never had one guy step up and go low and get momentum going like we’d had happen all year long,” Guhne said. “We wound up making some very bad bogeys at some very bad times. I think maybe we wanted it too much.”

As Guhne said, they had wanted it just the right amount during the regular season. They had won or tied for first in four invitational tournaments, then roared to the SoCon tourney title. It had earned them a No. 5 seed in the East Regional and placed on hometown soil. As late as midway through the final nine holes,they were 7 under par and among the top 10 teams.

But in the end, maybe that wasn’t a good thing.

“When you’ve played a course 100 times, you’ve hit it practically everywhere,” Hodge said. “It’s easy to overlook things when you play a course every day.”

Or, perhaps, look too closely.

“If we’d played a course we didn’t know very well, we probably would have hit it down the middle of the fairway like we had all year,” Guhne said. “Maybe we thought too much here, worried too much.”

Added Hodge: “There were a lot of expectations here. A lot of friends and family rooting for us. They wanted to see us do well. I thought about that a lot. Maybe we thought about that too much.”

The Mocs weren’t the only ones familiar with Council Fire, of course. Middle Tennessee State had played here before. Fifth-year senior and Cleveland, Tenn., resident Nick Bailes had played here often.

On Saturday his 74 helped the Blue Raiders finish ninth and earn a spot in the championship round.

But that’s not what makes Bailes special. Until mid-April his career figured to be over. He was the sixth man in a sport where only the top five compete as a team.

Playing as an individual in the Middle Tennessee/ALDILA Intercollegiate tourney on April 1, Bailes figured his career was over.

“I walked off the 17th green at Old Fort that day (he had started on 18) believing I had just played my last hole of collegiate golf,” he said. “I started thinking about the rest of my life.”

But Bailes’ roommate, Craig Smith, was having back problems. By the Sun Belt Conference tournament on April 20, Smith and his family decided it would be best for him to sit out the rest of the season.

MTSU coach Whit Turnbow turned to Bailes to bail out the Blue Raiders.

“Nick shot an 81 on the first day of the conference tournament and I was a little nervous,” Turnbow said. “But Nick understands what the team concept is all about. He shot a 72 and 74 the next two rounds. And we caught a good break when we were sent to the East Regional at Council Fire. Nick had played here a lot and we’d played here in the fall in the Scenic City Invitational (finishing fifth of 17 teams). I think that was a huge advantage.”

But advantages are ultimately what you make of them. Having already earned degrees in business administration and marketing, Bailes began practicing twice a day for the regional. By a tune-up tournament at Oklahoma State last weekend, he beat the No. 1 player in the country (OSU’s Rick Fowler).

“I’ve probably had enough school for awhile,” Bailes said with a grin. “Right now it’s all about birdies and pars.”

With the age of their players, the Mocs have enough school left to points realistically to the 2010 NCAA championship round, which will held at The Honors Course.

Then, as now, the Mocs would have the pressure of playing at home. Unlike now, they’ll have two more years of experience to deal with it.

“It’s tough going from nothing to No. 1,” Hodge said.

It will much easier moving from this spring’s 12th-place finish in the East to the championship round in the years to come.

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