Women's Golf Fall Preview
Sep 05 | Women's Golf
PISCATAWAY, N.J. - With new head coach Kari Williams and a fresh season in front of them, the Rutgers women’s golf team is ready to begin their next chapter this fall.
Williams arrived at Rutgers after coaching the Columbia University women’s golf team for eight years. Williams’s interest in the job included the “key selling points” of the school’s transition into the Big Ten, the university’s and community’s support for the athletics program and golf team and the people she would be working for.
“When I came and interviewed, I was absolutely impressed with Julie Hermann and her vision for how this was going to take place,” said Williams. “I was so impressed with Kate Hickey, the senior associate AD for Olympic sports, who is my direct boss. They immediately became people that I felt that I wanted to come and work for.”
The women’s schedule begins with the Bucknell Invitational in Lewisbug, Pa., September 6-7. The team will then travel to New Haven, Conn. for the Yale Women’s Intercollegiate September 26-28 and Westchester, N.Y. for the St. John’s Invitational October 6-7, before hosting the Rutgers Invitational October 10-11. Rutgers will conclude the fall season at the Fighting Camel Classic in Bouies Creek, N.C., October 20-21.
The 2013 team featured two freshmen, Taylor Clark (Rochester, Mich.) and Maddy Gedeon (Roseville, Calif.), who are expected to keep playing at a high level in their sophomore years. Clark was a consistently great golfer last year, playing all five events in the spring and pacing Rutgers in three of them. She shot a team-best six rounds under 80 and recorded an 81.21 scoring average, lowest among Rutgers golfers who played all events. Gedeon also played all five events last spring and averaged 84.07 strokes per round. Her season was highlighted by a 251 at the Kiawah Island Classic, second-best on the team.
Clark and Gedeon are two of Rutgers’s seven returning golfers, none of whom are seniors. Williams says the team’s group of five juniors – Samantha Moyal (Alameda, Calif.), Jacquelyn Mullens (Brookside, N.J.), Christina Paulsen (Ridgewood, N.J.), Gabrielle Sacheli (Pittsford, N.Y.) and Racquel Zurick (West Trenton, N.J.) – will “need to be leaders” this year.
“We’re going to be very reliant on them to help manage this year,” Williams said of the juniors. “They’re a great group of young women. I can’t say enough about them. For them to come in, to have a new coach, to just get to meet her and then the next day go to practice for the first time and go qualify – they have been nothing but working hard and supportive. I think they have bought in to everything I’ve brought to the table so far, and I need their leadership to do that. They kind of steer the ship. I put it in the right direction, but they create all the momentum of whether or not it goes where we want to go.”
Moyal has the most experience on the team, having competed in all 20 events Rutgers has played in the past two years. Moyal had a scoring average of 82.77 last spring. Her best finish last spring was at the Monterey Bay Invitational, where she shot a three-round 244 to tie for 13th.
Paulsen is entering her first fall season at Rutgers. She competed in ten events for Jacksonville University before transferring to Rutgers and playing in three events last spring. She finished the year strong by pacing Rutgers at the American Athletic Conference Championship, earning 22nd place with a 238 (83-76-79).
Sacheli will also continue to be a valuable member of the team. She finished the spring with an 83.58 scoring average over four events (12 rounds). She placed 12th overall at the Monterey Bay Invitational with a 242 (79-81-82).
Two decorated incoming freshmen, Tatum Jackson (Mountain Brook, Ala.) and Emily Mills (Colts Neck, N.J.), join the 2014 team. Jackson won the 2012 Alabama Girls Junior Championship, while Mills was the NJPGA Player of the Year in 2010 and 2011.
“I see some solid swings, and I see kids who are really excited to have the opportunity to play college golf,” said Williams of the freshmen.
“I think that they are going to be very impactful for us this fall.”
Jackson and Mills are two of only 12 girls in the nation to be named to the 2013 AJGA Hewlett Packard Scholastic Junior All-Academic Team. They will fit right in with a head coach arriving from the Ivy League and a team that achieved a perfect academic progress rate of 1000 for the 2012-2013 season.
“The academics and the student-athlete experience are the most important thing for me,” said Williams. “They’re here to get a degree from a great university, and we’re going to see that that happens. We want them to leave here either going into the graduate school of their choice, being employed in the field they want to be employed in or set up for whatever that next step of their life is. I think the Big Ten Conference speaks to that. [There are] billboards around the city and around the metropolitan area that say ‘Big Time Academics, Big Time Athletics.’ I think we’re going to embody that and push that forward.”
So what can we expect from Williams’s first season as head coach? She says her team will achieve goals “not necessarily driven by the numbers by ranking.”
“We’re just going to become better ball-strikers and we’re going to hope that the scores are reflective of the amount of hard work that these young women put into their game this fall, this winter and this spring.”
Players Mentioned
