SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — This time last year, the Texas A&M women were at home watching the national championship. Twelve months later the Aggies are in third place, well inside the first cut at the 2022 NCAA Division I Women’s Golf Championship.
Head coach Gerrod Chadwell joked with his team on Saturday that they hadn’t put three good rounds together yet this season. All kidding aside, he was right. Until Sunday.
The Aggies shot even-par as a team in the third round at Grayhawk Golf Club, putting them at 13 over for the championship, four shots back from current runner-up Oregon and 13 back from leading Stanford.
Leaderboards: Team | Individual
“We’re still growing and maturing. But you know, our bad round yesterday wasn’t as bad as they have been in the year where we haven’t won too many tournaments,” explained Chadwell, who’s in his first year at the helm in Aggieland. “But we’ve had a couple of runner-ups, top-three, top-five finishes, so we’ve got the horses, they just got to put it together and finish off rounds.”
Chadwell replaced a legend in the game in Andrea Gaston, who won three national titles with USC before shockingly joining A&M in 2018. Gaston was relieved of her duties as the Aggies’ head coach last April and Chadwell was announced as the fifth head coach in program history on June 8, 2021.
The El Reno, Oklahoma, native spent the last eight seasons as the head coach at Houston, where he was the first head coach in program history. Chadwell led the Cougars to six consecutive NCAA regional berths, earning three American Athletic Conference Coach of the Year honors after claiming conference titles in 2016, 2018 and 2019.
In 10 regular-season events this year, A&M finished in the top five in nine. The team’s worst finish of the year came at the SEC Championship, where the Aggies finished ninth.
Chadwell’s team was on pace to be only the second team under par from Sunday’s morning wave alongside Stanford, but two late bogeys dropped the squad back to even on the day, a great round considering the scoring averages over the first two days were 76.23 and 75.46.
“If you told me we’d be even par this morning teeing off I’d have taken it,” said Chadwell of his team’s performance. “Probably feel like we gained ground on the field. So any shot today gives you cushion for the top eight. So they’re all important.”
A&M is led by a pair of transfers in junior Jennie Park (TCU) and sophomore Zoe Slaughter (Houston), as well as Hailee Cooper, a former All-American at Texas.
“Our transfers really helped us out, and they like to compete,” said Chadwell on how the team has transformed into a national-title contender after ranking 90th last season. “That’s a good thing.”
But the success in College Station isn’t solely due to the transfer portal. The lineup also includes freshman Adela Cernousek and junior Blanca Fernández García-Poggio, who earned first-team All-SEC honors and leads the squad with a 71.85 average.
As Chadwell said, the Aggies have the horses, and they’re starting to run wild in the desert.
