Penn State Hazleton golfer Jeremy Harper helps team achieve historic three-peat
For the second straight year the PSUAC has partnered with a 400-level sports journalism class at University Park to offer feature stories from around the conference. This is the first in a series.
By DANIEL MADER
Five years ago, Jeremy Harper was deciding where he wanted to play golf in college.
He was heavily recruited by Penn State Hazleton head coach Jason Martonick, also called Jay. It wound up being a fairly easy decision for Harper — he wanted to stay local, and a lot of his family members went to Penn State.
“He was telling me all about what the future was going to hold for us,” Harper remembered from his meeting with Martonick.
By his junior year of college, Harper, a marketing management major, would be an All-Conference golfer, win a PSUAC individual title and help his Penn State Hazleton team win the 2021 PSUAC championship.
Harper and the golf team had everything going right.
Until late July 2022, when Martonick unexpectedly died at age 43. It was a loss that impacted the entire Penn State golf community.
“He was a great guy,” Harper said. “It was very stressful to hear about that … I was in total shock.”
Since losing Martonick, the Penn State Hazleton golf team has done something incredible: win two more titles in two seasons, making it three straight PSUAC championships for the program. The team, led by Harper each of the past few seasons, continues to honor its late head coach with its success.
“When I got recruited (by) Jay, I told him that it was my goal to do whatever I can to win for this campus,” Harper said. “To win three conference championships for the school was overwhelming to me.”
Three straight PSUAC titles were just a few more accolades in Harper’s young golf career, which began before he reached high school.
Growing up on golf
As a kid, Harper mostly enjoyed basketball and baseball. It wasn’t until middle school that he got into golf. Harper said his father has always been an avid golfer and influenced his decision to start playing.
“He was giving me all the aspects of what it’s like,” Harper said. “He taught me how to play it.”
By the time he reached his freshman year of high school, Harper was ready to drop his other sports and focus on golf full time. To this day, he credits both his father and his high school coach as two of his biggest mentors.
“(My dad is) the guy I've always looked up to growing up, playing a lot of golf with him,” Harper said. “(My high school coach) taught me (to) focus on little things as well.”
Martonick convinced Harper to come to Penn State Hazleton, where he’s since put together a few standout seasons over five years.
Honoring a legacy
Losing Martonick, the coach that had just guided them to a conference championship in 2021, was an incredible shock to the team. The start of a new season was just a few weeks away. Harper said the assistant athletic director filled in as the coach, and the team came together to focus on winning for Martonick.
“Our motto was to try and do something that we’ve never done before: trying to win another championship for our coach who passed away,” Harper said. “We won, actually by one shot.”
It was a miraculous victory for the program.
“We were thinking about (Martonick) almost every day,” Harper said.
The “rollercoaster” 2022 golf season was a tough one. But Harper and the squad accomplished their No. 1 goal: winning it for Martonick
‘Do it for your teammates’
In April 2023, Martonick was posthumously inducted into the Penn State Hazleton Sports Hall of Fame.
The Penn State Hazleton team naturally came into the 2023 season with high expectations, coming off back-to-back titles.
But they got off to a slow start. In September, Harper said he and the team still wanted to “peak at the right time, in the next month or so.” By Oct. 10, they were on top of the PSUAC once again.
“I was very happy to win it for a third year in a row, but I couldn’t have done it without my teammates,” Harper said.
Penn State Hazleton’s Dylan Antonick — the conference’s 2023 individual champion — led the way in the championship with a score of 146. Four Penn State Hazleton players finished in the top 10, including Harper.
“We bond so well as a team,” Harper said. “We have great leadership.”
While his future career may not be in golf, Harper wants to continue playing, possibly in local tournaments.
“I just like the competitiveness of (golf) — the drive, the edge,” Harper said.
It may be an individualized sport. But he and the Penn State Hazleton golf team have come together to win three titles in three seasons. “That's what's kind of interesting about this sport,” Harper said. “You can do it not only for yourself, but you gotta do it for your teammates as well.”
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Daniel Mader is a student in the John Curley Center for Sports Journalism at Penn State.