Underdogs Once Again, Michigan Ready to Surprise at NCAA Championships
5/18/2016 12:00:00 AM | Women's Golf
May 18, 2016
By Brad Rudner
The University of Michigan women's golf team, small but mighty, is entering uncharted territory.
On paper, the Wolverines aren't supposed to be where they are, which is among the 24-team field at the NCAA Championships for just the second time in the 40-year history of the program. Opening-round play begins on Friday (May 20) at the Eugene Country Club in Eugene, Oregon.
Ranked 80th at the end of last season with just one senior returning (Catherine Peters) and a cumulative total of zero years postseason experience, grand expectations of titles and trophies weren't heaped on this bunch at the start of the season. Just making it to the NCAA Regional Championship, something they hadn't done as a team since 2002, was an accomplishment within itself.
Seeded 13th of 18 teams -- and with only six advancing -- the odds weren't exactly in their favor. The course, Shoal Creek Club in Shoal Creek, Alabama, clearly was, as the Wolverines improved their score every day of play to advance (916 -- 311-305-300), eight strokes clear of seventh-place California (924 -- 307-307-310). They were the only team in the field in which every player broke 80 every day.
Was it a goal? Absolutely. Was it expected?
"If you told me at the beginning of the season that we'd have qualified for the national championships, I would've taken it and run 50 miles," head coach Jan Dowling said. "We didn't have to become this new team that does something brilliant. You just have to play solid golf to make it, and that's what we did."
This time last year and in the 13 years before that, the girls on the team would be back in their hometowns, done with school, done with golf. Not this year.
It speaks volumes about the culture that Dowling and assistant coach Mary Mattson have created. They've taken seven women, all of whom from different backgrounds with varying levels of experience, and molded them into a championship-caliber team in just three short years.
Peters, the only player Dowling didn't recruit, didn't have a girls team at the high school she went to, so she played with the boys. Freshman Elodie Van Dievoet, from Belgium, was born with golfing genes, as her mother, Florence Descampe, played on the LPGA Tour. There's another freshman from Spain (Maria Alzueta Garcia) and three others who are of Korean descent (Grace Choi, Megan Kim, Kathy Lim).
And then there's Emily White, the only player on the team from the state of Michigan (Saline) who comes from a family of big Ohio State fans. She's also only been playing the game of golf for a few years; she gave up softball after her sophomore year of high school.
"We're all different and come from different places," Peters said. "But each and every one of us has this overarching goal of making the program better every time we tee it up."
The high-ceiling, coachable kids? Those are the types of student-athletes that Dowling targets. Most of the time, she's forced to go outside the state -- and sometimes the country -- to find them.
Dowling believes that in order to be a successful "northern" school, you've got to get a little beat up in competitions. To that end, she purposely fills the schedule with challenging events. Almost always, that means traveling to a different (warmer) part of the country to play on courses that you have no familiarity with and against teams that are better than you are.
If you're lucky enough to make it this far, college golf is a nine-month grind. With the weather in Michigan being as unpredictable as it is these days, the team is forced to get creative with their training, especially when there's snow on the ground. Luckily, the men's and women's teams put in countless hours of work at the Weisfeld Family Golf Center, a relatively new, state-of-the-art practice facility complete with heated hitting bays, an indoor short-game practice area and an indoor simulator.
It's all part of the plan, and this year, that plan worked brilliantly.
"We're not trying to peak in February and March. We train to be out best in April and May, for championships," explains Dowling. "It takes some pressure off and gets you in the mentality of getting better every day, every tournament, every week, every month. We get better faster."
The Wolverines are averaging 295.55 per team round this season, which, if it stands, would be the only sub-300 team average in program history. When put together, all five players in the lineup are playing one-and-a-half strokes better than last year, including big drops from White (-2.99) and Peters (-2.62). Put all five scoring averages together, and U-M is saving nearly 10 strokes (9.81) per round. Already this year, they've set team records for lowest 18-hole (275), 36-hole (584) and 54-hole (825) tournaments, as well as program-best scores at both the Big Ten Tournament (865, broke the old record by 17 shots) and NCAA Regional (916, broke the old record by 10 shots).
To prepare for Eugene Country Club, Dowling has given her team opportunities at different courses. Just last week, they played a practice round at Oakland Hills CC in Bloomfield Hills. Earlier this year, they played at TPC Michigan in Dearborn.
"Some of these southern schools, they might be sick and tired of golf by now," Dowling said. "They've been playing in tournaments since December. Golf is a mentally challenging game, and it can get stale. I've seen it happen."
Don't expect that to happen to Michigan, not this week, and especially not for Peters, who will be able to end her collegiate career on a high note.
"This is going to be the last time I get to play with this team," she said. "With Regionals, it was a question. To see how far this program has come in three years, it's a whole different level of excitement."
In the week-plus since returning from Regionals, the success of this program has attracted a lot of attention from people who might've otherwise turned a blind eye. Interest is at an all-time high.
But make no mistake: they're not going to Oregon for the scenery. When they step onto the first tee box on Friday, they're tied with every other team at zero. Ignore their rank (47th by Golfstat, 49th by Golfweek) and their seed (24th of 24). They didn't care about that last time. Why start now?
"They have high expectations for where this team is going to go," Dowling said. "They want to make Michigan a great program, a nationally prominent program. They want to be the ones to stamp their name on it.
"And now they know what success looks like."
