BY CONNOR SMITH, SDA COMMUNCIATIONS STUDENT ASSISTANT
Right from the beginning, the 1994-95 Arizona State women’s golf team showed that not only were they great, they were historically great.
The Sun Devils would win their first tournament that year by a staggering 36 strokes on their way to an undefeated season never seen before, and one all of us may never see again.
“We had a really good team the year before and we had a lot of players returning so we expected to be good," says Vollstedt, who now works for the Sun Devil Athletics in the Sun Devil Club. "You certainly don’t go into a season expecting to go undefeated because it is so difficult to do in women’s golf. We had won the 1993 and 1994 title and some players were coming back so we knew we were going to have a really good season.”
The team of Kellee Booth, Heather Bowie, Linda Ericsson, Kristel Mourgue d’Algue and Wendy Ward, led by Sun Devil Alum and Hall of Fame Coach Linda Vollstedt, set numerous individual and team records while helping ASU win their third straight NCAA (’93,’94,’95) which also had never been accomplished.
“They were all such good individual players, so they were always competing with each other. I told them let’s have an individual winner at each event. The team got along great, it was never a group that got jealous of each other or anything of that nature. They all wanted to perform well so I challenged them to win the individual titles not just the team titles. We also talked about winning by as many strokes as possible because I didn’t want this team to get complacent. As the year progressed they just fed off of each other. It was a really exciting year.”
The Sun Devils won the team title in all ten tournaments they competed in, undoubtedly living up to the lofty expectations of the program. During the 1990’s the Arizona State Women’s Golf program won SIX NCAA Championships, which was, at the time, twice as many titles as any other program in history.
“Recruiting really helps. When you recruit really good players, you know going into the season that you have some off the best players in the country. You just want to keep winning, so a tradition was created. The players coming in expected us to win. It became a culture of the program. We win tournaments. The best players wanted to come here.”
The 1995 team ran away with the Pac-10 Championship before blowing away the field at the Landfall Club in Wilmington, N.C., en route to claiming their third consecutive team title. Senior Kristen Mourgue d’Algue would take home the Individual title, amazingly her first title as a collegiate.
Coach Linda Vollstedt took home several National Coach of the Year honors, while Wendy Ward won the Eleanor Dudley Player of the Year Award (her second). All five members of the team were on the PAC-10 All-Conference Team.
The 1994-95 team helped attract much needed national attention to such a dominant program and 20 years later memories are strong.
“I keep in touch with most of them. It was 20 years ago so they all have gone their separate ways, but I try to keep in touch with all of my players. That is the nature of women’s golf at ASU. Missy (Farr-Kaye) played for me and now she is an assistant on the current team, so she is connects with a lot of the Alums through newsletters and Facebook. That makes it much easier to stay in touch with all of the players.”
Here are some numbers from that 1994-95 team:
4: First Team All-Americans, the first time 4 four players from the same school have been named to the First Team. (Wendy Ward, Kristel Mourgue d’Algue, Heather Bowie, and Kellee Booth).
9: Individual titles won out of ten total tournaments.
25: Average stroke margin of victory for the Sun Devils that year.
26: Strokes ASU won the NCAA Championship by.
37: Tournament wins in the decade of the 1990’s.
155: Number of head-to-head wins in tournament competition along with one tie.