On May 11th, 2018, in Howey-in-the-hills, Lake County, Florida, the DePauw women’s golf team competed in the NCAA Division III Women’s Golf Championships on El Campeon Golf Course. After a the tough match, the team tied for 10th place! That marks the 13th time that the DePauw women’s golf team has placed in the top 14 in NCAA.
After last year’s successful season, DePauw’s women golf team has increased from a roster of 10 players to 14 players, and they are looking to reclaim or improve their title of 10th at Nationals.
“At this point, it is far too early to have much insight as to the contributions of first year players,” head coach Vincent Lazar said. “The hope is the larger roster will lead to more competitive team qualifying.”
Outside of This year, 11 of the 14 players are in Honors Program. Compared to last year when 8 of the 10 players on the team were in Honors Programs! Juniors Larisa Luloff and Rachele Miller are returning All Americans.
“I think if we go out and play well, then I think that we should definitely be able to be in position to go back to Nationals,” Miller said. “My ultimate goal would be for the team to get better than 10th this year. I think that we could get like 5th or 6th.”
Miller has been playing golf since she was 10 years old. A typical week for miller consists of about 2 hours of practice, 6 times a week. According to Miller, the golfers may spend up to 5 hours a day golfing to establish a travel roster for the upcoming tournament. The team travels as far as Houston, Texas to play.
On top of athletics, Miller is an economics major, a management fellow, and holds other executive positions in organizations on campus.
During Miller’s semester long management fellow internship, she worked in Indy so she could continue golfing with DePauw. “I purposely worked at Indy so I could still play golf,” Miller said. “ I was still working full time during the week, and of course you still expect yourself to perform as well on the weekends. It is really hard to do that when you have a full time job… It is still something that I will cherish for the rest of my life, even though it was difficult to balance most of the time.”
“Coaching has little to do with it. They play 90% of every competitive round without a coach.” said Coach Vincent Lazar. These women have been training since summer, and they are ready to come back for another great season!
Junior Anna Foley, is a returning golfer that has already been acclaimed as Academic All American, as well as, an Elite 90 winner. Foley is also an international student from Canada. While foley started out as the only international student on the team, that quickly changed when other players joined from India, China, and Russia.
“We absolutely love laughing about different ways we use words for things that we had growing up that no one else had heard of. When you spend 12 plus hours with each other every weekend, [between] practice and [being] on the road, becoming a family wasn’t hard at all.”