PLYMOUTH — When the Northern Lakes Conference round robin ended in a three-way tie between Warsaw, Northridge and Plymouth, Saturday’s NLC tournament suddenly became a lot more interesting, and teams began eagerly anticipating the finale at Pretty Lake Golf Club.

They’ll have to wait a little longer.

The rain kept coming down, and with even more on the forecast, coaches decided to call it a day following a bit of debate at the golf club in Plymouth. The tournament will reconvene in a nine-hole format on the back side at Pretty Lake Monday. The first groups out had only finished three holes Saturday, so everyone will start from scratch at Monday’s make-up.

“We just talked through every alternative,” said Warsaw head coach Rich Haddad of Saturday’s coaches meeting. “The reality is we may get a small window today, but every group has to play nine holes. The last group was just finishing 1, so that needed to be a two-and-a-half, three-hour window, and the weather looks like that’s really unlikely, which would’ve wiped out the day anyways for everybody. So the idea of waiting for three hours and maybe, maybe not versus let’s just come back on Monday and make it happen seemed like the most reasonable thing to do for the kids and for everybody involved.”

The Tigers finished up the conference round robin at 6-1 after falling short versus Northridge on the Raiders’ home course at Spring Meadow Valley Thursday night. With Northridge, Warsaw and Plymouth all knotted at one loss apiece and the next closest team sitting at three losses, the conference capper will be for all the marbles.

“Northridge really played well on Thursday to win, which put us in a three-way tie. We came here and beat Plymouth at their home course so it’s kind of an interesting scenario where winner take all,” Haddad said. “So instead of coming in going ‘Well, we just have to play decent,’ now we’ve got to go out and earn it and get the win to win the conference, which is fun.”

The team sitting at fourth in the NLC standings with three league losses, NorthWood is hoping to make up some ground Monday. Apart from the Panthers’ collective chances, top flighter Caleb Lung also has a good shot at individual championship honors come Monday after winning two straight invitationals — the Culver Academies Invitational and the Concord Invite — the past two weekends.

“Caleb has been playing really well. He needs to just kind of keep rolling and keep doing that,” said NorthWood coach Trevor Shields.

“We have a good opportunity on Monday to hopefully make a move up in the conference, and hopefully Caleb can come out and play really well like he has been and the rest of the team can too. Because they’ve had a good year overall; we just have to connect all the pieces at one time.”

The fact that Monday’s make-up will be truncated to nine holes isn’t entirely without controversy, but it’s written that way in the NLC bylaws so there’s simply nothing to be done about it. What it will do is shrink any margin for error: There are fewer chances to make up big numbers should golfers post any Monday. And if they do, they may need to be bold to shave strokes when opportunities present themselves.

“It’s on our bylaws we’re playing nine holes, so we can’t go against those,” explained Shields.

“If we can get our team to all play well together, we can be one of those teams that threatens things. I’ll be honest with you, it gives us a little more of an uphill climb being nine holes because you just don’t have as many holes to make up ground. But you can also look at that the other way and say you have less holes to not play well.”