Women's golf strives to be a successful program in Prairie Fire athletics. With talented players, outstanding coaching, and superb facilities, Prairie Fire women's golf has achieved success in the Midwest Conference as well.
The women's team started as a club in 1993 and was one of the leaders in getting conference status for the sport. Knox won the very first conference championship and has claimed four titles since 1996. In addition, the Prairie Fire qualified for the NCAA Division III National Championship in 2000, finishing ninth in the country. Caroline Burgland (1996) and Crystal Fox (2002) were individual medalists at the MWC Championships. In 2020, the Knox golf program joined the St. Louis Intercollegiate Athletic Conference.
The Prairie Fire have had several golfers earn all-conference honors, most recently first-teamer Shelby Keen '21 and second-teamer Samantha Nichols '20 in the 2019 season. Nichols also claimed the first ever hole-in-one in the history of the SLIAC conference.
The SLIACÂ offers an automatic qualifier to the NCAA National Tournament, which gives Knox golfers an opportunity to compete at the highest level of Division III competition.
Knox golf teams practice and compete at Soangetaha Country Club in Galesburg, a private 18-hole course that is one of the finest in Illinois and has hosted both state and national tournaments. Knox golfers are also allowed unlimited access to the course while in season. When the team is not on Soangetaha’s rolling fairways, golfers can use their state-of-the-art indoor golf performance center that was unveiled in the fall of 2017 by the generosity of numerous golf alumni. This room comes equipped with everything a player could want with a 1,500-square-foot putting green, custom wooden lockers for every player, big-screen television, two teaching cameras and an AboutGolf simulator that is the only one of its sort to be approved by the PGA of America.
Prairie Fire golfers have gone on to a wide variety of successful careers. They include Sarah Lewis ’98 (biochemistry, music), who did her residency for pediatrics at the University of Tennessee. In addition, Wendy Spizzirri ’99 (economics) is a financial representative for Northwestern Mutual Financial Network and Tiffany Felde ’98 (Spanish) is the education director for Artsonia in Chicago.
For more information, submit the Recruit Me form or e-mail head coach Preston Roth at proth@knox.edu.
