Process Server—How New Coach Trake Carpenter Will Impact DU Men’s Golf

After a lengthy delay, the new University of Denver men’s coach wants to make his mark.

By Anthony Cotton

After a novel coronavirus-necessitated delay, last week Trake Carpenter finally became a collegiate head coach, taking his University of Denver Pioneers down to Arizona to compete in their first tournament since being hired some six months ago.

And, completely in keeping with those travails, the opening 18 holes of the three-day event were played in a miserable, steady rain, eventually leading to rounds that took more than six hours to complete.

“We brought hand warmers to Arizona, which is practically unheard of,” Carpenter said. “Definitely one of the longer days I’ve seen in a while.”

Not that he was complaining—in fact, the adversity provided Carpenter with perhaps the first practical application of some of the coaching tenets he’d been sharing with the team while they waited—and waited—to actually put them to use on the golf course.

“We’ve been working on things since I’ve been here, and a lot of it is process oriented,” he said. “I want us to focus on the things we can control—do we have a good game plan? Can we stick to one shot at a time? A day like that, everybody’s probably going to have a double bogey or have to hit a provisional. But when it Dows happen, are you going to stick to your routine? Did you have an extra towel? Did you have all your rain gear?

“So I gauged our performance on how we took things (in the poor conditions), and I thought we were kind of average at that…I thought we broke down as a team coming down the stretch in that area…I’m not gonna sit there and scoreboard watch and get on guys for what they shot—I’m gonna get on them for how they handled themselves.”

Sufficiently chastened (and perhaps with slightly better weather), the Pioneers indeed performed much better on Day 2, improving their collective score by 30 shots (they eventually finished tied for 10th in the 17-team event). It was the kind of bounce back that Carpenter hopes to see throughout the season, one of the first steps, he says, of establishing what he thinks the team’s standards should be under his watch. A former player and assistant coach at Ball State, Marquette and Stanford, Carpenter says he was exposed to the philosophies of the men he worked under, picking and choosing some of the things he wanted to bring to the table at Denver.

However, even while being in the room as some decisions were being made, Carpenter admits that it’s one thing to watching events and choices unfold is entirely different than having to make them yourself.

“Working as an assistant, you’re usually coming in to somewhere where the culture has already been established, there’s a way of doing things—here, it’s up to me to establish the culture, and being a coach without an assistant I can’t pawn anything off to anyone else either,” he said. “It’s on me to set those standards early and communicate them to the guys. Now, it’s me taking the pieces of all the things I’ve learned throughout the years and making all those different puzzle pieces fit and making it what I want our culture to be and how we operate as a program.”

One area Carpenter says has helped in that process is his relationship with Brian Cain, a mental skills coach who has worked with athletes in almost every sport, Through the years, Carpenter has not only been tutored by Cain, but has developed a relationship with him; since getting the job at DU, Carpenter has had Cain address his team on numerous occasions. That might have been, he says, one of the more pleasant consequences of having the Pioneers’ Fall season cancelled because of the pandemic, rather than trying to figure out what the program was going to be on the fly while competing in tournaments, Carpenter ended up with more time to work with the players on their mental skills and what things would look like as they eventually returned to the course.

“I mean, you can try and find some perspective and to turn anything into a positive if you want,” he said. “Obviously you want to play, but since we didn’t I did have more time to connect one-on-one with the guys, we could spend more time working on the mental side of things and the culture and all those things that are really difficult to do if you’re playing and traveling and all the things that come with the Fall, which is a pretty short, busy season…Long-term, it really did give us a kind of head start to establishing some things we may have had to normally put off.”

All of 30-years-old, Carpenter says he was able to do some self reflection as well during the Fall; while his players were developing their mental skills, Carpenter says he was working out physically and mentally, digging deep into meditation.

“Over winter, I think I got into a really good place,’ he said.

Alas, there are occasions when even the most centered team member may find him or herself unable to control the chaos, say, during a rainy round of golf in Arizona. It is during those moments when it might be wise to seek wisdom from one of the modern Zen Warriors, former Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers coach Phil Jackson, who—probably after contemplating some Dennis Rodman spawned headache—famously reflected that “Good team become great when the members trust each other enough to surrender the Me for the We.”

Carpenter says that applies to the coach as well as his players.

“Brian called me out in the Fall too…we’re all holding each other accountable; I’ve given them that freedom—if I’m not holding up my end of the deal, they’d better call me out. I want to have the kind of program where we’re doing that on a daily basis and setting the standard for ho we’re going to do things.”

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