Michigan Golf Journal April 2021

Michigan Golf Journal Central Michigan Univ. In many circles, they say it takes a village. In the case of Central Michigan women’s golf, that village reaches far and wide. When the Mount Pleasant university resurrected the program in 2014-15 after a 31-year hiatus, growth and success were expected, eventually. But the strides the Chippewas have made over the past three years are remarkable, and the uptick in performance coincides with the arrival of coach Jim Earle – and some international flights – in August 2018. Earle’s Chippewas posted 2 third-place team finishes, a 4 th and a 5 th in five fall events during his first season. Prior to that, the Chippewas finished dead last, or close to it, in most every event in which they had played. Come the fall of 2019, barely a year after Earle’s arrival, the Chippewas broke through with their first win , at the Oakland Golden Grizzlies Invitational. And they did it with three freshmen in the lineup. Those freshmen not only helped deliver the Chippewas’ first championship trophy, but their collective arrival in Mount Pleasant just before the season signaled the direction that Earle was taking the program. That trio comprised of Padgett Chitty of Valdosta, Ga. and internationals Zoe Vartyan of Austria and Claudia Salvador of Spain. To that point, just one player in the five-year history of the resurrected program had grown up outside the state of Michigan. In October of 2019, Salvador won the Purdue-Fort Wayne Mastodon Invitational. It was the first win for a Chippewa since the program’s re-birth . CMU opened this spring season with a fifth-place finish in the 11-team Mid-American Conference Challenge Central Michigan Golf on Meteor Rise By Andrew Sneddon Coach Jim Earle