College golf is different than most spring sports. Like tennis and track & field, it is an individual sport that is competed as a team sport. But more than most other individual sports, the physical and mental requirements can overwhelm a player’s skill.

“With the way college golf is set up, it’s like a sprint,” says Huskies golf coach Dave Pezzino. “You come in the night before for a practice round. You then play 36 holes in one day, carrying your bag walking. If you’re struggling with your golf swing, that’s a long day. You have to have the understanding that if you’re not playing great, you still can find a way to get it in the hole.”

As the Husky golfers head into this weekend’s New England Division I Golf Championships at Newport National Country Club in Newport, R.I., they are looking to repeat last year’s success, when they won the tournament, and then continue it on the following weekend in Innisbrook, Fla., site of the 2011 Big East Men’s Golf Championship.

Matt Dziubina is the team’s leading golfer during the spring season.

“Matt is doing a great job managing his game,” Pezzino says. “He is hitting it well and he is scoring well for the Huskies. I like how he is all business in the course and nothing seems to bother him on the course. He doesn’t get too high or too low. He is in total control of his mental game. His preparation has been well focused.”

Pezzino, in his third year at UConn and 13th overall as a collegiate coach, says the challenge of coaching college players is to understand each golfer’s abilities, knowing they have worked to develop their own game with other golf professionals for years.

“I rely on them to work with their home pro as well as me,” he says. “I’m not the kind of coach that wants to jump in on everybody’s golf swing. I don’t want to be micromanaging them. I feel confident in my ability to see their swing and what works. These guys have logged in years and years with their own coaches. They do a great job of doing their work in the winter time, and they’ve used that pretty well.”

Today’s young golfers all can drive the ball off the tee, so Pezzino spends time working with the Huskies to sharpen their short game, emphasizing accuracy with short irons, wedges, and putting.

“A lot of their time has been spent on wedges and getting their distances down again from 110 to 75 yards into the green,” he says of the team’s practice rounds. “They’ve even invented games in our indoor facility specifically around chipping and putting.”

Yet a player’s mental approach to the game is often the most challenging aspect of golf, something Pezzino emphasizes.

“What our group has been doing better and better, is managing the mental side of it, not trying to kill themselves over every shot that is not 100 percent perfect. For the younger player, that is most certainly the challenge,” Pezzino says. “We talk about it all the time. The minute you get upset, your brain starts shutting down. You stop thinking properly. In a lot of our pre-round meetings, I’ll mention we make sure to manage ourselves first, not the golf ball. The older they get, the better they get at it. It’s not easily acquired. It’s such an untapped area of training of young players.”