WSU golf

Fall 2017

The competitive world of WSU women’s golf

Playing in the most competitive collegiate conference for women’s golf has its challenges.

It also has its benefits.

“We get to play with some of the best golfers in the world,” says Kelli Kamimura, who is starting her ninth season as coach of Washington State’s women’s golf team. “The Pac-12 is tough. It’s definitely the powerhouse conference right now.”

Sixteen of the past 25 national championships have been won by Pac-12 schools, including current champ Arizona State, which in May set a Division I record with its eighth NCAA golf title. Two other Pac-12 teams also won trips to nationals last spring.

Washington … » More …

Spring 2004

Long-Hitting Kim Welch Puts WSU on the Golf Map

Kim Welch has a surprising knack for hitting a golf ball long and straight. The rest of her game isn’t bad either. She finished fifth in the 2003 NCAA Women’s Golf Championship, two strokes back of the winner in a field of 140 golfers. And she was only a sophomore in her first national tournament.

Welch’s ability to distance the ball from the tee seems to defy the law of physics. She carries 135 pounds on a lean five-foot-six frame. Not the imposing physical stature of a power hitter. Still she can drive a ball 300 yards on occasion. Her average is 290 yards, according … » More …

Summer 2006

A course of one's own, or The Coffee-Can Country Club

If I’ve never seen a prettier golf course, I suppose it’s because I built it myself, and because I was eleven.

It was 1966, and in my Salem, Oregon, neighborhood, I was that most exotic of hothouse flowers: a golfer. I loved playing baseball. I loved football, too, at least the passing and catching, if not the hitting and hurting. But I regarded myself as a golfer. Golf was uncanny, old, impossible, beautiful, soul snatching. I knew these things already. In a neighborhood of robust, rowdy, baseball and football-loving brawlers, I was, at best, a curiosity.

The field behind my house, all 290 yards of … » More …