By SHANE SHARP

Wake Forest golfer Chad Wilfong had reached a crossroads in his young career at the beginning of this summer. The Thomasville native and former East Davidson High School standout had notched two solid seasons on the Demon Deacons resurgent men’s golf team that finished 10th in the 2001 NCAA championships.

But as a member of a major NCAA Division One squad with a boatload of talent, Wilfong played in only nine of the team’s 22 regular season events. If Wilfong was going to make a run at the Deacons’ upper echelon this season, it wasn’t going to be through attrition. Wake returns all eight of its players from a team that finished eighth in the country last season and includes only one senior this season.

The 6-foot-2 Wilfong could either accept his role as a periphery player, or spend the sweltering hot days of the North Carolina summer grinding away in amateur tournament after amateur tournament, hoping to improve his game.

Wilfong chose the later, and no one is more impressed than his golf coach, Jerry Haas.

"He had two choices," Haas says. "He could accept it or work harder, and he has had a great summer. As a coach, that makes you so proud. It’s a big adjustment for these kids, growing up here in college. One thing I knew when I recruited Chad was that he was a good person, and he had a fabulous short game. I think he had what it took to play on this golf team."

Wilfong wasted little time in proving Haas right, winning the North Carolina Amateur title back in June with a combined four-day score of 280. He made it to the quarterfinals of the North-South Amateur at Pinehurst, and missed qualifying for the United States Amateur by just one stroke at the Crescent Golf Club in Salisbury in early August.

Rather than tinker with his golf swing, Wilfong says he has been using the summer tournaments to get some much-needed repetition for a golf swing that was totally rebuilt two years ago.

"I haven’t been working on a whole lot," Wilfong says. "I have been playing pretty good so I haven’t changed a lot. Coach and I worked on a lot of changes the first two years and now they are starting to fall into place. If something goes wrong, I will address it then."

Wilfong was a two-time state champion in high school, but he was the first to admit that his swing would not stand up to the type of competition he would face in the formidable Atlantic Coast Conference.

"As a junior player I was very tall and I had an upright swing and it was easy to work it from left to right, but not right to left," Wilfong says. "When I got to college, I learned that you couldn’t just have one shot because these guys are too good. We (coach Haas and I) worked on flattening my swing, getting it over my right shoulder and on plane."

As a result of the changes, Wilfong added an eye-popping 40 yards to his drives and picked up 10 to 20 yards on his iron shots. But the improvements have come at a price. Wilfong says it has taken him almost two years to become comfortable with the swing changes, but that watching the world’s best player go through the same experiment has been something of a tonic.

"It is kind of like when Tiger came out on Tour and started working with Butch Harmon," Wilfong says. "He won a lot at first, and then changed his swing and didn’t win for a while. But he had to do that to get better. After it sunk in, he was winning again and winning a lot. I don’t expect to win as much as him, but I expect to be in contention every time out."

Haas’ expectations for Wilfong have changed as well. With loads of talent but only a five-man tournament rotation, Haas has some tough decisions to make about who he plays in each event.

"Chad will play this season," Haas says. "I like Chad a lot and I have a lot of respect for him. If anything, Chad needs to get more competitive, but he has shown me that by what he is doing this summer he is ready to do that. One of the things that Chad needs to do is believe in himself and believe that he can play with Bill Haas and Jay Morgan and those guys."

Wilfong will probably get his chance this month, as the Deacons kick off their season in the East Tennessee State University Invitational September 8-10 in Johnson City, Tenn.

"I expect us to move into the top five, since we have so much talent," Wilfong says. "We really don’t have a bad player on the team. I see us making a good run for the national championship."