Auburn Continues Pursuit of Consecutive National Titles with General Hackler Championship Win at The Dunes Club
The Auburn University men’s golf squad made an emphatic statement Tuesday in winning the 2025 General James Hackler Championship Presented by Carolina Wealth Advisors at The Dunes Golf & Beach Club, lapping a strong field that included six of the top 50 teams in the NCAA Division I men’s collegiate rankings.
Paced by medalist Brendan Valdes and his final-round 65 that put him at 12-under par for the 54-hole tournament, the top-ranked Tigers continued their march in defense of their 2024 national championship with a team score of 33-under, 17 strokes clear of second-place Louisville (39th in the NCAA Division I Men’s Golf SCOREBOARD Rankings) and 19 shots better than third-place Duke (ranked 19th).
Wake Forest and Baylor tied for fourth at 2-under, rounding out the top five that includes the only teams to finish under par at the Robert Trent Jones signature design that will host the PGA TOUR’s ONEflight Myrtle Beach Classic in May.
Valdes bested Duke’s Ethan Evans by one stroke to top the individual leaderboard, followed closely by 8-under scores from Auburn teammates Josiah Gilbert and Jackson Koivun, Louisville’s Sebastian Moss and Coastal Carolina’s Max Bengtsson.
Koivun’s impressive showing this week at The Dunes Club continues a staggering two-year run that began in 2023 at TPC Myrtle Beach. That’s where Koivun won the Dustin Johnson World Junior Golf Championship, before enrolling at Auburn for what would become a historic freshman year for the San Jose, California native. Koivun’s first year of college play included a 2024 SEC Championship, runner-up finish in the NCAA Division I Men’s Individual Championship, and becoming the first player ever to sweep all four major collegiate awards in the same season (the Haskins Award, Jack Nicklaus Award, Ben Hogan Award and Phil Mickelson Award).
Koivun has since earned spots to compete in multiple PGA TOUR events, garnering 15 points in the PGA TOUR University Accelerated Program that leaves him just five points shy of earning his PGA TOUR card, which he is projected to do later this year.
Host school Coastal Carolina finished eighth (+9) in a 16-team field that also included Kent State, East Tennessee State, North Carolina State, Nevada, Furman, Missouri, North Florida, College of Charleston, Liberty and High Point.
