Head coach Gerrod Chadwell is heading into his third season at Houston, with a young team looking to build on the successes of last season. The Cougars return all but one player from last season and will be looking for a longer stay in the NCAA postseason. | Courtesy of the UH Athletics
The men’s golf program at UH has a long and illustrious history.
The team has seen 16 team national championships, eight individual championships and produced several notable professional golfers like Fred Couples, Bruce Lietzke and John Mahaffey.
But few know of the women’s golf program, led by head coach Gerrod Chadwell.
“Everywhere I have been across the country, (people) are very aware of the men’s team and the history there, but they just assumed that there was women’s golf here,” Chadwell said.
In May of 2013, Chadwell was hired to build a women’s golf program from the ground up and he has wasted little time in developing his brand.
In the 2013-2014 inaugural year of the program, the Cougars had a roster of just four players, including freshman Kelli Rollo, who redshirted, and the team was ineligible to compete, but
Chadwell still guided his players to individual success.
Junior Courtney Ferguson posted four top-20 showings and freshman Emily Gilbreth added a pair of two-20 finishes in their first seasons, but it was University of California—Davis transfer, Raegan Bremer, who stood out.
Under Chadwell’s leadership, Bremer posted four top-10 finishes on the season, was named to the All-American Athletic Conference Team, and captured the first tournament win in school history, and the first individual title of her career as well, with a win in the Houston Baptist University Husky Invitational, forever etching her name in Houston’s record book.
That summer, Houston brought in former University of Kentucky Wildcat Lucy Nunn to be assistant coach and added enough players to compete as a team in the 2014-2015 season.
In the first season of competition, expectations were low based on a series of unknowns, but
Chadwell wanted to set the bar as high as possible.
“My goal, selfishly…was for us to make it to the postseason,” Chadwell said. “I wanted us to make it to regionals so the girls could see what it’s like. I wanted them to realize the joy of moving on or the harsh reality of it being over.”
Whatever happened during that season, the bar would be set for the future of the team, and while that kind of pressure might be too intense for some players, it attracted others.
“A huge part of why I wanted to go to UH was because my first year was the first year of the program, which I think is really awesome,” sophomore Megan Thothong said. “Not a lot of people can say that they were part of starting a team.”
For the Cougars, success spread from into the entire team, with Houston enjoying six top-5 team finishes and five top-3 showings in 2014-15.
At the University of North Florida Collegiate Tournament in Jacksonville, Thothong played a near-perfect round to capture the first individual title of her young career, sealing the program’s first team championship.
“We got our first win second semester, my first win collegiately, and that was a really big deal for our program,” Thothong said. “It will forever be the first win in school history.”
Houston wrapped up the regular season with a third-place finish in their first appearance at the AAC Championship and earned the first postseason appearance in school history as the No. 12 seed in the NCAA San Antonio Regional.
For a first-year program to make it to regionals is rare, but the team expected nothing less.
“The whole year, we thought we were going to regionals,” Bremer said. “I think that is part of what put us there, the fact that we believed we would make it there no matter what.”
The team finished 13th at regionals with a score of 293 and, while ineligible for nationals, the foundation of success had been laid.
“There were a lot of irons in the fire the last two years, but it’s coming to a slowing down point in a sense,” Chadwell said. “We’ve got a lot of pieces in place as far as the kids go. Now, we’ve got a lot of structure around them, people we want to surround them with.”
With a solid coaching staff in place and a young core of players, Chadwell said that this is the first summer where he can actually relax and enjoy the fruits of the past few years’ work.
Heading into the 2015-2016 season, excitement around the program is high and players are looking to continue their strong play.
“We are all coming back and no one is really new at what we are doing, so I think expectations might be a little bit higher for everyone,” Thothong said. “But I also think we’ll do a pretty good job of living up to those expectations.”
For Chadwell, the next step is taking on the big-name golf programs in the region.
“I want to be competitive with the Texas schools in our backyard,” Chadwell said. “If we can be one of the better schools in the state of Texas, then we’ve got a great problem on our hands.”
Despite all the team accomplished in just two years, they are still a relatively unknown group, even on campus, but that doesn’t bother the players.
“It’s nothing new,” Bremer said. “We are comfortable there. I think everyone would rather be on the hidden side a little.”
They say the best predictor of coming success is past success, so the future of the Women’s Golf program at UH looks promising, and they won’t stay hidden for long.
“If we are consistent and put good results together, people will notice us,” said Chadwell. “And if we do that over a long enough period of time, everyone is going to know our product.”
