‘What if I shot 42?’: How Nine Holes of Golf Changed the Course of Towson Golf Forever

Some seem destined for the course. Mike Larkin, the Director of Golf at Towson University, is one of those people. Even as a baby he was teething on a golf club.

In his early childhood years, his dad showed him VHS tapes of Jack Nicklaus called Golf My Way. The father and son sat in front of the TV mesmerized by what the World Golf Hall of Famer could do with a golf ball. Larkin was hooked.

Growing up in Yorktown, New York, Larkin played many sports; the two most prominent in his life were golf and baseball. 

“I started playing full rounds when I was 10. I started playing tournaments in the next few years,” Larkin said. "I was also playing travel baseball at the time. I would go play a tournament in the morning and then I’d play a baseball game at night.”

When Larkin started at Yorktown High School, he had a choice to make. At that time, golf and baseball were played in the same season. For Larkin, the choice was clear. He put down his bat and picked up his clubs.

While competing in high school he picked up many sporting influences that would shape his life. One such influence was Tiger Woods. Woods was beginning his reign as golf’s preeminent player, having just set the record for quickest ascent to world No. 1 including his first of five Masters Tournament wins.

“He wins the Masters and completely changes what golf means,” Larkin says of Woods. “He’s the guy that is going to outwork everybody and prepare.”

That mentality resonated with the teenage Larkin and carried with him to Towson.

Before he stepped on to the Towson campus, Larkin was reaching out to Towson men’s golf head coach Brian Yaniger via email about trying out for the team. Larkin knew he was coming to Towson on a full academic scholarship. Now his sights were on a roster spot on the men’s golf team.

“All summer long, Mike kept sending me emails,” Coach Yaniger recalls. “He’s saying, ‘I’m coming out to Towson. I want to try out for the team. I have a full academic scholarship.’ What this showed me more than anything else was total dedication, self-confidence and self-belief. The way these emails were written, it was pretty clear to me that he had it in his heart that he was going to make it happen. You can read the emails from some guys, and it feels like it was copied out of a book, but his work was very much from within himself.”

They headed out to Bonnie View Country Club. Larkin was paired with two seniors, Josh Upton and Gregg Cote. Cote was just named First Team All-America East the year prior to Larkin’s arrival to Towson while pacing the Tigers with a 148 at the 2000 America East Championships which Towson won. Upton would end up earning First Team All-America East honors in 2001. Larkin was in a stacked group.

As Larkin describes it, “[Coach Yaniger] put the little freshman that wants to walk on with the two seniors who are the heart and soul of the team.”

Larkin stepped up to the first tee and started to swing. He was expecting to play a full round and talk to Coach Yaniger after the round. He started by carding a 34 on the front nine. Word began to spread. After Larkin pulled the ball out of the ninth hole, Yaniger approached him and offered him a spot on the team.

“I believe in the eye test,” Yaniger said. "When you watch somebody play, you know if they can play or not. It was clear to me that he was going to be a starter in our five-man rotation.”

They played the back nine, but Larkin can’t remember what he shot because he was on cloud nine.

“I think back to this moment very frequently,” Larkin said. “What if I had shot 42? Golf is like that, right? Good players will go in and shoot a high number occasionally. If I shoot 42 on those nine holes, my career path might be completely different than it is now. I was going to stay at Towson regardless and be an economics major with a business minor. I would probably have ended up doing something completely different with my life. I think those nine holes of golf were the most influential two hours of my young life and a major inflexion point.”

The 2001 season, Larkin’s first season with Towson, saw the Tigers win the Hofstra Invitational. The first tournament of the 2002 season was the Towson Fall Invitational back at the course where it all started for Larkin, Bonnie View Country Club. Towson won the home tournament and Larkin shot 145, taking home the individual win.

“For me, as a player, that tournament epitomized what it meant for me to be a Towson Tiger,” Larkin said. “We were so good that it forced me to be good. Winning that tournament, the accomplishment wasn’t beating the other players in the field, it was beating my teammates. If I beat all my teammates in whatever tournament we were playing in, I had to play great.”

That culture of friendly competition pushed the Tigers to some of the greatest success Towson men’s golf had seen. In Larkin’s junior and senior seasons, Towson made it to back-to-back NCAA Regionals, the only time that has been done in the program’s history. The 2003-04 team, Larkin’s junior year, won four tournaments. The 2004-05 team made it to NCAA regionals in part due to having two players win Coastal Athletic Association (CAA) Co-Players of the Year, Towson Athletics Hall of Famer Billy Wingerd and Jeff Castle. In the last tournament of his collegiate career, Larkin carded a three-over par 216, tied for the best score among CAA golfers at the tournament.

Larkin ended his Towson playing tenure with the sixth best scoring average, fifth most birdies and fourth most career rounds played. His 2004-05 season scoring average of 74.0 was his career best and fifth best in program history at the time. Larkin ended his career as the back-to-back CAA Scholar Athlete of the Year and 2004-05 All-CAA Second Team member.

“I think what I remember most about my time as a Towson student-athlete is how good we were and how we pushed each other to be great. You had to be great and if you weren’t great, you weren’t in the lineup. Playing with them every day, practicing with them, having them be that motivational force was the best thing for me. If you ask Tiger, ‘Do you want all your competitors to average 73? Is that fun for you?’ He’d say, ‘No I want them to shoot 64 so I can shoot 63 and beat them.’ That’s how I look at my time at Towson, being influenced by great athletes. I didn’t want a bunch of guys who shoot 78 and I just shoot 75 to beat them. I want them to go shoot 68 and I’m the guy that shoots 67,” Larkin said.

“[Larkin] was a great teammate. He was a leader and there if anyone needed anything,” Castle said. "He was always cheering for everybody and even if he wasn’t playing great, he wanted to make sure the team was playing well. He was probably the most positive person on the team and mentally did a great job of not getting rattled. He did a great job of keeping everyone pretty levelheaded when we were playing in tournaments.”

After graduating from Towson summa cum laude with his degree in economics, Larkin turned his sights on going pro. After several years trying to break through, Larkin returned home to New York. He worked as an assistant golf professional at the Golf Club of Purchase with the goal of becoming a PGA professional. While working at the Golf Club of Purchase, a familiar partner called.

Coach Yaniger had announced he was retiring. Larkin’s former teammate, Jeff Castle, was the assistant coach at the time. Both Yaniger and Castle reached out to Larkin expressing that he would be great for the job. It was tough for Larkin to leave his job back where he grew up but the call of his golf home, the place that allowed him to pursue a career path he loved, was too much to ignore. After Towson underwent a nationwide search and interviewed their talent pool, Larkin was offered and took the job in 2017.

“It was the opportunity to help young people who would be in the same seat I was in that was so appealing,” Larkin said. “I felt that my life experience, learning about high-level golf, that I could help them. I’m big into player development. I know what it would take to go and make the PGA Tour, how to practice, how to strategize and the mindset to give yourself the best chance.”

“You could see and feel when talking with [Larkin] how much he wanted it,” Yaniger said. "Mike is somebody who wants to get to the top. We saw the dedication. We liked the fact that he’s an alum and was on a great team at Towson. He knows what Towson can be. He doesn’t just accept that Towson is a mid-level CAA team. How are we going to win a conference championship? You go out and you put it in the player’s mind that they’re as good as anybody. Mike can do that.”

“Mike was one of the best teammates that you could’ve asked for. It was the way he carried himself. He was always positive on the golf course,” Castle said. “After college he got into teaching. That’s a great parallel for a golf coach to come from being an instructor like Mike did after graduating. Mike added an intangible piece knowing that this is a guy you can trust with not only teaching you how to play the golf course a little bit smarter or deal with adversity while keeping a positive mindset, but you can also come to him for swing advice. He can help someone who is struggling with chipping or putting or hitting a certain shot because he can do it himself. It’s a huge thing when you can add all those pieces together and offer all that to a student-athlete.”

Larkin took over the men’s golf team for the 2017-18 season. His first season showed what would become a trend in the Larking coaching tenure. The 2017-18 team had a four-player scoring average of 295.6, at the time good for fourth all-time in Towson history. Two of the three teams ahead of Larkin’s first year coaching were the teams he played on during his junior and senior seasons.

The trend of Larkin rewriting the record books with his coaching prowess has been well documented. Six of his seven non-COVID impacted seasons as a coach are in the top 10 team scoring seasons in Towson history. The most recent campaign was the second best in Towson history, pushing Larkin’s junior year down one spot. Two golfers Larkin has coached, Sky Aung and Jeremy Summerson, nearly surpassed his teammates Billy Wingerd and Jeff Castle for the single season scoring record. Aung’s 2025-26 season was 0.151 strokes away from breaking Wingerd’s record. Summerson’s 2022-23 season was 0.156 strokes shy of Wingerd’s record.

“We’ve got guys that are pushing closer and closer to knocking Billy Wingerd off the top spot,” Larkin said. "That’s going to fall here shortly. It makes what I do every day so fun, to chase the ghosts of the 2004 and 2005 teams.”

Larkin’s impact on Towson golf cannot be understated. He has either played with, coached or is 10 of the top 13 career scoring averages at Towson. He was on the team, as either a coach or player, for nine of the top 10 single season player scoring averages and eight of the top 10 single season team scoring averages including the top four seasons. The most notable trend is Larkin slowly pushing himself off the Towson record books. His senior season, which was the fifth best individual scoring season when he left Towson, is now 24th in Towson history. Ten of the players above him are ones he has coached.

“It’s bittersweet. As a player, thinking back to 2005 me, he would never think that would be possible. The me that took this job for the specific reason of helping the student-athletes here maximizing their potential, that’s the coolest thing that could ever possibly happen! I will hopefully no longer populate on the top 25 list,” Larkin said.

Larkin’s greatest impact on Towson golf started to form prior to the 2024-25 season. The women’s golf head coach position had opened up and Vice President of Athletics Steve Eigenbrot had the vision to create one position to oversee both programs with associate head coaches specific to each team.

It is a lofty position for one to undertake. It would mean countless hours on the road and living in hotel rooms for much of the fall and spring seasons. For Larkin, there was only one answer. Yes.

“What makes it so appealing is that it doubles the number of student-athletes that I can impact,” Larkin said. "I took the men’s head coach job with the goal of impacting student-athletes and now I can do that on the women’s side as well.”

Larkin sees huge potential with this new set up. As a mid-major program, the ability to combine forces closely with both golf teams on campus provides double the support. During the grind of coaching both teams, there are valuable lessons that can be shared between the teams. If Larkin is at a women’s tournament and sees something that can help the men’s team, it can be easily implemented. It turns two separate units into one, stronger unit.

“Mike is infatuated with golf and he loves Towson because he played here. He’s going to put 100% into his work every single day and get the program as good as he possibly can get it because that’s always how he conducted himself academically and athletically,” Castle said.

As this new chapter as Towson University Director of Golf begins for Larkin, one question remains in the minds of all Towson golf fans.

What if Mike Larkin had shot 42 on the front nine during his freshman year at Towson?