|
Chris Brady Charts a New Course 11/10/2004 By Meggie Butzow So much can change in such a short time. Just ask Chris Brady. A year ago this time, she was finishing up the fall half of her first season as a collegiate golfer. She had helped her senior-laden team to two autumn championships, including a co-medalist performance, which set up the team’s unprecedented fifth place finish in the NCAA Championships last spring. Fast forward a year — months, really — and see how things change. The depth and seniority that characterized last year’s history-making squad no longer exists, and where Brady was a freshman learning the ropes a year ago, she has now clearly assumed the leadership on a team that lists two sophomores and four freshmen. “I immediately figured out what my role as a sophomore is,” Brady acknowledges, “to provide leadership on and even off the course and try to boost the freshmen like others helped me last year.” <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” />
She has certainly accomplished this so far, placing in the top 10 in three of this fall’s four tournaments and winning the Landfall Tradition over Halloween weekend. “I’m definitely happy with how I’m playing,” she admits. “My game definitely improved throughout the fall. I started out a little bit rocky; I’d been in summer school all summer and I wasn’t really ready for the level of competition. But it was good to jump right in.” Her progress this fall has been more than consistent, as she has improved her finishes with each event. “I had an eighth place finish at the MRC (Mason Rudolph Championship) and sixth place at Stanford,” Brady relates. “I think with the eighth and the sixth (places) I was really hoping for the Top Five, but I was still very happy with the Top 10, and I think those two that were just out of the Top Five definitely made me focus last time (at the Landfall Tradition). North Carolina is my home state, so I had family and friends come out, and it was very exciting and I felt like I was going home and I wanted to do really well for them.” One of those special spectators at the Landfall was Brady’s mother, Peggy Harmon Brady, who played two years of intercollegiate golf herself for Vanderbilt in 1970 and 1971. Though no women’s golf team existed then, she represented the Commodores with two Top Three finishes in the Intercollegiate tournament, roughly equivalent to today’s NCAA Tournament. “She’s on a different level than I was,” her mother insists, ignoring her own history as Vanderbilt’s first female All-American as well as her participation in such professional events as the U.S. Open. Between her mother’s competitive golf and her father’s recreational love of the game, Brady basically “grew up in a little golf cart basket.” “I was probably four the first time I started swinging and practicing,” she estimates. “It’s just been kind of a family thing. That’s our family time, when we go out and play. We have four people (Brady has a younger brother), so it’s perfect. And I grew up in Atlanta on a golf course so we’d go out and have putting contests on the greens at night. It’s just always been a part of my life.” Thanks to her mom, the path to Vanderbilt was almost built-in as well, although both Chris and Peggy laughingly confess that Peggy was not all for having Chris follow her to Nashville. “I worked too hard at academics and didn’t have fun, and that was a big mistake, other than the great golf experiences,” Peggy freely admits. “I wish I had taken advantage of the social life. Unfortunately I gave her the impression that (Vanderbilt) is not as good as it is. I’m glad I went there because I got a good education and the people in Nashville and at Vanderbilt are great. “When Chris called me during her visit to Vanderbilt she was so excited and babbling away,” her mother continues. “She had seen Legends and the facilities and hit it off with (Head Coach) Martha (Freitag). When I went to visit it was like a totally different world. Nashville is beautiful now, and she’s in a really great place.” For now, that great place involves shouldering much of the burden for Brady, a challenge that she welcomes. “Now, as a sophomore, everybody looks to you and needs answers and sometimes I don’t always know them because I’m just a sophomore,” she explains, “but I think about it and remember that they’re freshmen and they need some guidance. But it has definitely called upon my golf game to step up. I’m not a third or fourth spot anymore; last year any one of us could have been number one. We all played number one at some point last year, and this year, I must put more into it.” It’s not only Chris Brady’s position on the women’s golf change that has changed so drastically and so rapidly, but also her mother’s opinion of Vanderbilt. “Don’t ever think the grass is greener on the other side,” her mother warns Chris, “because it’s good just where you are — you’ve got it really good.” |
