It's crunch time for Blue Raider golfers

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Senior Nick Bailes, a Cleveland, Tenn., native, is writing a daily postcard from the NCAA National Golf Championships. Following is his third installment.

Day two is in the books and everyone on the team either bettered their performance from round one or at worst equaled it. We had to fight pretty hard to shoot 5 over despite several bumps along the way. I think everyone feels like we have yet to put it all together and play well and actually finish a round so hopefully that will come tomorrow. We caught some decent weather this afternoon as the wind didn't really blow as hard and the temperature stayed right around 70 the whole time, perfect for scoring.

The NCAA decided to throttle back the rough a little bit by making the middle cut of rough expand further away from the fairway. So now the middle cut just off of the fairway is around 3-to-4 inches and the outer rough is anywhere from 5-to-7 inches in places. This helped tremendously as scores were lower today, although even par was the lowest team score posted.

The weather forecast for the next couple of days looks pretty grim so I would guess scores will be on the rise for the final two rounds. With that said we need to go out (Friday) morning and be prepared for the worst. Regardless of the weather, we need to play a good round and secure ourselves of making the cut. The two goals for (Friday) obviously are make the cut first and foremost and then try and cut into the 13-shot deficit we have to overcome in order to make it to the top of the leaderboard.

(Friday) will test our guts and find out who we really are as a team. This is what we play for though, to be put in the situation and see how we hold up against the pressure. We get to play in the morning and will be on the golf course the same time the leaders will be playing. So now there are no excuses, time to see who came to play.