In the second round, one which saw the weather conditions hold a stiff upper hand, the Lions added seven strokes to their lead and ran away with the tournament.
"I'd say 10 shots in any tournament is a wide margin of victory, but when you look at it with four scores [the number of scores counted for each team by its individual competitors] you can make ten shots up," Leon said.
"And three shots that we had the first day could be made up after the first hole."
Greg Pieczynski, Marco Poccia and Ted Neville chipped in with scores of 149, 151 and 154, respectively.
David Dankmyer, the fifth member of the Lions, came back with a strong second round score of 76, after a dismal first round 83.
"It's good to see Mark play real well on a facility like that, and Marco stepped it up again for us, which was good to see," Pieczynski said.
This was a very significant victory for the Lions because a loss would have put them behind the "eight-ball," in terms of regional ranking.
"We would have been in pretty bad shape as far as the rest of the season in trying to make up on other district teams," Leon said.
The Lions had played only one tournament prior to the Temple invite, and most of the teams coming in had played in and won a couple of tournaments in the district--like Georgetown and Maryland.
Losing to a team like Rutgers, that never finishes in the top four in the region, would have put at least four, five or six teams ahead of the Lions in the Mid-Atlantic Region point rankings.
"It was very important we pulled it out on the last day," Leon said.
"We can breath a little easier next week in the Yale."
Maryland was supposed to be the real challenge for the Lions in this tournament, but they withdrew at the last minute.
That's something that Pieczynski believed could be attributed to Glenmaura not allowing the teams to practice on the facility before the tournament.
Also, the Terrapins were just wrapping up a ten-day road trip from Rhode Island to New York.
"They may have been a little cranky," Pieczynski said.
Either way, with or without Maryland, the Lions won, and they had enough to worry about with the way the golf course was playing.
Just ponder how the team shot a 304 in comparison to its 293 of the first round and still gained seven shots on the field.
The team's practice round on Thursday was held in snowy conditions, the first round on Friday was cold and windy with steady gusts of 15 to 20 miles per hour, and Saturday combined rain with the wind to put sub-par scoring at a premium.
"The fairways were so soaked," Leon said. "The whole course was under water on the last day. If you stepped on the ground, water was coming up."
"Playing college golf in the Northeast isn't really indicative of how you played."
Considering the conditions, the Lions played the way they needed to -- they played to win.
