The Jayhawks placed in the top five for the third straight tournament Tuesday. This time the Jayhawks’ finish took place in the form of a three-way tie for fifth place at the Missouri Intercollegiate in Columbia, Mo.

“Overall we played OK this week,” coach Kit Grove said. “We hoped to build on our good second round a little more than we did.”

Top scorer for Kansas was freshman Chris Gilbert, who was even par for the event and tied for ninth place. It was Gilbert’s best finish for the Jayhawks in his young career.

“This was a great experience for Gilbert to get a top 10 finish,” Grove said, “There were definitely some positives.”

Nebraska came in first with a score of seven under par as a team. Kansas State placed in second with Missouri coming in third. Brandon Crick of Nebraska, and Curtis Yonke of Kansas State were both five under par for the three rounds and shared first-place honors for the tournament.

Freshman Alex Gutesha shot rounds of 75, 72, and 76 and was the second-best scorer for the Jayhawks. Fellow freshman Dan Waite finished just one stroke behind Gutesha at eight over par for the tournament. Senior Bryan Hackenberg also shot eight over par in the three rounds and sophomore Blake Giroux finished at 11 over par.

“I got off to bad starts in every round, but I was happy with the way I improved after that,” Gutesha said.

The three rounds were a bit of an up and down for Kansas with a total score of 301 in the first round, 282 in the second and 302 in the final round.

“This seems to be the way it goes for us; we’ll play a good round and then a bad one,“ Grove said, “The guys need to do a better job of controlling their high and low emotions.”

The Jayhawks’ next event is the three-day Big 12 Championship in Trinity, Texas starting April 23. Kansas will be looking for redemption against Nebraska, Kansas State and Missouri.

“We’re going to try and build on some of the positives we had in this tournament and it will be nice to get our horse Nate back,” Grove said.

Junior Nate Barbee is the team’s number-one player. Because of a back injury he was unable to play this week, but should be ready to go in two weeks.

“Getting Nate back will be huge for us,” Gutesha said, “If we all play well at the same time, we can do well in the Big 12.”

— Edited by Katie Blankenau