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It was a heartbreaking trip, a little more than six hours alone on I-75 and Florida's Turnpike with nothing but a maps app and jazz to soften the hard, dark mood. My drive took me from our home in Peachtree City, Ga., a half-hour south of Atlanta, to Winter Park, Fla., just a couple of miles northeast of downtown Orlando, the opposite side of the city from Disney and the kind of old-world hamlet that attracted captains of industry to the Sunshine State a century before Walt and his ilk started buying orange groves and swampland.
This trip was far from magical. Like millions of American parents, my unexpected trek was to pick up our daughter from college, and not after a successful school year where the apprehensions of a hectic fall melted into spring fever with Frisbees on the quad and job fairs at the gym. Coronavirus obliterated all of that. Before the middle of March, universities called it quits, moving classes online and sending students packing long before their expected departure date. Graduations, balls, spring-break frolics with all the mistakes therein ... all wiped away.
Also gone: all winter NCAA championships and spring sports seasons. No basketball tournaments, no lemonade in the bleachers while cheering a lacrosse team amid dogwoods and cherry blossoms. Baseball, softball, tennis, rowing and volleyball all shuttered along with the dorms and dining halls.
Golf is gone, too. That was what made my trip so disheartening. My daughter is a freshman student-athlete at Rollins College. She was in the middle of a better rookie campaign for the women's golf team than we could have hoped for when the entire nation put on the brakes.
Rollins is a small, liberal arts college (the oldest in Florida) with exceptional academics and an athletic record that will leave you saying, “Huh, I had no idea.” The Tars (and for those who haven’t read Jules Verne in a while, that’s a 19th-century term for sailors) boast a women's golf program that is among the nation's most storied and successful, with 13 national championships and three members of the World Golf Hall of Fame: Peggy Kirk Bell, Marlene Streit and Hollis Stacy. Jane Blalock also played there, as did Alice Dye, who met her husband, Pete, also a Tar, at Rollins.
When I took my daughter, Liza, on her first visit to Rollins, she loved the campus and the coach, Julie Garner, who is, herself, in the Women’s Golf Coaches Association Hall of Fame.
More recently, Charlotte Campbell became the first player in women’s golf history to be national Player of the Year four years in a row, from 2003 through 2006. Joanna Coe, now one of the most successful female PGA of America professionals, won the NCAA Division II individual title in 2008 while at Rollins. And David Leadbetter’s daughter Hally was a three-time All-American and led the Tars to a national championship in 2016.
When I took my daughter, Liza (above), on her first visit to Rollins, she loved the campus and the coach, Julie Garner, who is, herself, in the Women’s Golf Coaches Association Hall of Fame. The question Liza asked as we toured the facilities was, “Do you think it matters that it’s D-II?”
I pointed to the cabinet filled with NCAA Championship trophies and the championship banners hanging from the ceiling like flags at the United Nations and said, “Those look the same. So do championship rings. You’ve got a lot better chance of winning one or more here than you would at a D-I school that’s never sniffed a title.”
Liza nodded and said, “I’m coming here.”
As a parent you always want to encourage your child. But as someone who played college golf with varying degrees of failure and who has been in the game his entire adult life, I knew the mine shafts that can open underneath you at any moment. That was what made Liza’s freshman year at Rollins bring a tear to my eye. Not only was she a President’s List student, she posted top-five finishes in her first two starts as a freshman and was low Tar in the Peggy Kirk Bell Collegiate Invitational in early March. The team was ranked sixth in the nation and trending in the right direction, and Liza was on track for All-American consideration as well as All-Freshman honors.
She gave only a couple of hints at her goals and they were lofty. Having won three consecutive Georgia high school state championships with her team, she said to me during Christmas break, “Wouldn’t it be cool to have four national championship rings to go with these? I could wear seven.” She also showed me a poster of Campbell that hangs in the Rollins athletic center. “I want that,” she said, staring at Campbell’s image and list of impressive accomplishments.
And just like that, it’s gone.
Liza was supposed to be in Maui last week. The University of Hawaii invited Rollins to its tournament at Kapalua Resort. Instead, she was eating fried eggs and Apple Jacks at our kitchen table. We were thrilled to have her home, and I’ve hugged her every day. But the loss hangs heavily.
It’s hard to lament a college and amateur golf season when people are losing their jobs and, in some cases, their lives. But the game has always been about more than balls and sticks, grass and cylindrical holes in the ground. It’s about relationships. It’s about life.
College athletics are designed to foster leadership, build character and prepare young people for the curveballs that are bound to come their way. What none of us expected, and what we all – young and old – now must learn to accept is that some curveballs come faster and harder than others.
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