It was a long time coming, but soon young women whose heroes abound in the LPGA will get their chance to show off their golfing skills on a competitive basis.
Beginning in 2011-12, the College of Wooster will offer womens golf to its stable of athletic programs. The addition of the sport brings the total offered to 23, including 12 for women.
I think it started with some student interest three-four years ago, said Scot mens golf coach Rich Danch. When Wooster hired president (Grant) Cornwell, he came from a school that had (womens golf) and he asked me to write a proposal, and it moved forward from there.
Its moved in a hurry, too. Wooster will field a team next fall and join four other North Coast Athletic Conference schools – Allegheny, Denison, Hiram and Wittenberg – that offer the sport for women. There are 167 schools in NCAA Div. III ranks that offer the sport, with nearly a fifth of those teams (36) competing within the Great Lakes region.
Danch, a 1989 COW graduate, will handle the scheduling and recruiting duties for getting the program up and going. Beyond that, though, time will tell whether he handles both the mens and womens programs like some of his counterparts do at Allegheny and Wittenberg.
Despite his baseball pedigree at Wooster, where he helped Wooster reach the World Series for the first time in school history, golf has been a part of his background.
Baseball is a half-life ago, he said. Ive been a PGA professional for 20 years now. I was the No. 1 golfer when I played for my high school team and had baseball not been such a commitment, I would have played golf as well (at Wooster).
I began golfing a couple of months after the World Series in 1989, and thats the only business Ive been in since. The move from a traditional club pro to a college golf coach was not difficult. To look at working with women as well as men, Ive done that in private instruction.
The bug for bringing the sport to Wooster was planted when a young woman transferred from Mount Union, where she played on the womans team, said Danch. She wondered why there wasnt a womens team (at Wooster) and she tried out for the mens team because that was her only option.
That is no longer the case as Danch looks to implement the first new program since softball came to Wooster in the spring of 2000.
Were going to compete next fall and my charge is to work up a budget and a schedule, develop a working relationship with the golf course and spend the year recruiting, plus cultivate the talent in the current classes, said Danch. Staffing beyond next year is an unknown.
Golf for the men is a fall and spring scenario, and that will be the same for the women, as well as recruiting spring and fall.
Recruiting brings its own set of challenges, said Danch. There is precedent among my colleagues at Allegheny, DePauw and Wittenberg for one person to coach both programs.
That will be decided internally whether they want that to happen and whether it makes sense for the student–athlete, said Danch. Im not sure that is up to me. It works for mens and womens swimming, mens and womens cross country and track, where they compete at the same time, but not for mens and womens tennis at all.
Hes excited to be working at building a new program for a multitude of reasons.
Ive been coaching mens golf for 14 years and you get into patterns, said Danch, a former relief pitcher for the Scots. Its nice to entertain doing different stuff and change patterns.
And, it doesnt hurt that it is an opportunity to offer different choices for a new generation. Instead of putting out fires, Danch is looking to light a fire under the fledgling program.
