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GREENSBORO — The Guilford College golf team was mourning the loss of its longtime coach, Jack Jensen, while preparing for the NCAA Division III championship at this time last year.

The 2011 team makeup is much the same, and now with coach Corey Maggard they're preparing for another national title effort and hoping for a better finish.

The Quakers placed second in 2010 after a tense final day in Hershey, Pa., during which they nearly made up an 11-shot deficit during play that came down to the last hole.

Now another chance at the title is here.

Guilford is the host school for the 2011 national championship beginning Tuesday at Grandover Resort.

The team is itching to begin play -- and play well.

"I don't want to get to the summer and have any regrets," Maggard said. "This group was here last year and lost by one shot."

They're a young team, too. No seniors are among the top five, and the team's scoring leader is Noah Ratner, a sophomore from Asheville.

Ratner sees a home-course advantage to playing at Grandover, where the team has been practicing.

"I'm really excited that we're going to have so many fans and stuff here this year," Ratner said. "We haven't had that."

And another thing they won't have, or at least has abated somewhat: grief from losing their coach in midseason.

It's hard to think of Guilford golf and not mention Jack Jensen, who died in March 2010 at age 71. He had been at Guilford for 45 years and coached golf for 33.

"I was with the guys at the end of last season, and I was encouraged at the heart they played with," said Korky Kemp, Eastern director of College Golf Fellowship and the interim coach last year through the NCAA tournament.

Upon Jensen's death, the Old Dominion Athletic Conference named its golf coach of the year award after him.

"I'll be in the grocery store, I'll be in Target and I'll run into someone who was former basketball player, or a former golfer, and they've got these great Jack stories to tell me," Maggard said.

Jensen also coached basketball, and his teams won national titles in both sports. He's in several sports halls of fame, including those for Wake Forest, Guilford County and North Carolina.

Maggard, who still has the Kentucky tags on his SUV, was named ODAC coach of the year this season. Ratner was golfer of the year. Guilford's Alex Wise, of Eden, was named freshman of the year.

Maggard, who is 25, knows that reaching as many people as Jensen will take time, though that's not his goal.

For now, he has the players working hard. Some days the Quakers can't leave practice until they each hit the flag stick at the driving range, Ratner said. He calls the changes mostly "little things," such as showing up as a team for practices rather than working individually.

"Jack was a little bit more lenient on the practice," Ratner said. "He just wanted you to do whatever you did to play well in the tournament, and it worked for them under his watch."

The team was at Grandover from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m. Thursday, then had a team dinner. Six-hour practices aren't unusual.

But it's not all business. Maggard likened his rapport with players to a "brotherhood."

"I'm not too far out of my college days," Maggard said. "I understand and I know there are a whole lot of different aspects of the college experience."

It's common to see Maggard take to Twitter to poke fun with some of his players (follow him at @GCcoachMaggard).

Recently he posted a photo of player Dusty Roberts holding a box turtle, finding a new "girlfriend."

"Quiet at 1st, then she came out of her shell :)" he wrote.

But there is one abiding philosophy among the two coaches.

"It's about each player that you get in there, and each student that you have in those classes, having them get the most out of their experiences," Maggard said. "There's so many coach-of-the-year awards that Jack placed in a trash can, because it was not about Jack Jensen."

Contact Gerald Witt at 373-7008 or gerald.witt@news-record.com