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Freitag Featured in the Nashville City Paper 7/12/2006 Vanderbilt women’s golf head coach Martha Richards Freitag will serve as head coach of Team USA in the 2006 Fuji Xerox USA vs. Japan Collegiate Golf Championships July 13-15. The event takes place at the Sun Hills Club in Tochigi, Japan. Track results of the competition at www.collegiategolf.com and click on the link for 2006 USA Japan Matches. (Please note there is a 14-hour time difference.) Freitag was also featured in a story by Brett Hait of the Nashville City Paper. Here’s the article: Hoops or links: Difficult college decision paved Freitag’s life path In 1991, Martha Richards was handed a painful ultimatum: choose basketball or golf. The message, coming from Stanford women’s basketball coach Tara VanDerveer, was clear but still too difficult for Richards to accept. Richards was, after all, a certified sports nut. In addition to playing golf and basketball, she hunted, fished, skied and watched sports on television as feverishly as any couch potato. She wanted to slice none of it from her life. Still, VanDerveer drew a line in the sand with Richards, who at the time was a member of the Stanford women’s golf and basketball squads. VanDerveer was demanding a year-round commitment. “She told me I had to choose,” said Richards, now Martha Richards Freitag. “I didn’t want to choose, so she kind of chose for me. That was tough, because I was recruited to play both, and I went there with the understanding that I would be able to play both.” Just like that, Richards’ basketball career was finished. “At that point, basketball was my favorite sport, and when somebody takes your favorite toy away, that hurts more than when you decide to move on,” she said. Fifteen years later, Freitag is now the highly successful women’s golf coach at Vanderbilt. She has led the program to an NCAA Championship appearance in each of her six years, including one this spring, and has twice been named Southeastern Conference coach of the year. This week, Freitag is in Tochigi, Japan, coaching Team USA in the 2006 Fuji Xerox USA vs. Japan Collegiate Golf Championship. Freitag was destined for a successful career in athletics. Her father, C.A. Richards, played basketball and tennis at the University of Wisconsin. Her mother and two older brothers were also involved in athletics. Freitag’s competitive zeal was evident as a youngster. Her father would bet a quarter that she couldn’t make 10 consecutive left-handed layups. Even in the frigid winters of Hudson, Wis., Freitag wouldn’t give up until the bet was won. “If it was snowing, I’d do it until my hands froze,” she said. “I’d go inside to let the hands thaw out, then go back outside. I was just determined to do it.” Freitag played organized basketball on boys teams until the eighth grade. As a ninth grader, she made the girls varsity roster. As a senior in 1988, she was named national high-school player of the year by the Women’s Basketball News Service and earned first-team all-America honors by USA Today and virtually every other media outlet. “I was recruited by everybody but Texas and Tennessee, I like to say,” Freitag said. She landed at Stanford, partly due to the promise of also being able to play golf, and was a member of the school’s 1990 national championship basketball team. Freitag, however, was buried on the bench behind standout wing players Jennifer Azzi and Katy Steding, who later would become members of the 1996 U.S. Olympic team. Stanford won the national title again in 1992, which would have been Freitag’s senior year. By that time, however, basketball was a thing of the past. Golf had taken over. Total athlete, total person Stanford’s coach was Tim Baldwin, who helped start the program at the school in 1979 and stayed on the job until 1996. Neither knew how intertwined their lives would become in the future. In June of 1997, Baldwin married Freitag’s mother, Tobi, who had long since divorced from C.A. Richards and had moved to Palo Alto, Calif., to be near her daughter. Baldwin, who was elected into the Golf Coach’s Hall of Fame in 1997, died last August at the age of 66 with Tobi at his bedside. A memorial service was held in October at the Stanford Golf Course and Club House. Freitag and the Vanderbilt squad were in attendance. “He was one of the most amazing people I’ve ever been around,” Freitag said. “I loved so many things about him. He was very dear me.” Freitag, who played on the LPGA Tour in the mid-1990s and served as an assistant coach at Boise State and Texas before arriving at Vanderbilt, continues to be influenced by her stepfather and former coach more than any other golf figure. “He was so supportive of the total athlete and the total person,” Freitag said. “He wanted me to continue to play pickup basketball, to ski in the winter and water ski in the summer. He felt like it made me a better golfer because it was part of who I was as a person. “That, to me, was great coaching. He knew he wasn’t dealing with someone who was just a golfer. He knew his kids and knew what kind of people they were. I think that art is somewhat lost in coaching now, and it’s something I try to pay attention to.” Happy, healthy and successful The results at Vanderbilt have been obvious. Freitag guided the Commodores to the 2004 SEC championship. Former VU standouts Sarah Jacobs, Courtney Wood and May Wood earned All-America honors under Freitag before venturing into professional careers. Several current players appear headed in a similar direction. Even Vanderbilt players who never knew Baldwin, including rising sophomore Jacqui Concolino, say his influence on Freitag is obvious in the way she runs her program. “She refers to Tim a lot,” Concolino said. “He had a lot of good stories and knowledge about the game that he was able to share with Martha because he so close with her and was her coach and her stepfather. She tells a lot of stories about the little ways that he taught people. He had a huge influence on her, that’s for sure. She looked up to him very highly.” Freitag has also developed her own philosophies. “I tell the players that I really want to see you be happy, healthy and successful,” she said. “The decisions I make are all based around that. You may not completely understand why I’m doing something, and you’re welcome to come talk to me about it, but I’m doing it because my hope is to help you get those three things. “I have no ulterior motives. I don’t have another agenda. My goal is to see you have a fantastic, positive experience, win a lot and kick everybody’s tail. That’s my foundation for coaching and for my decisions.” Fifteen years ago, Freitag was forced to give up basketball against her will. She chuckles now at how that meeting set fate in motion. “That probably turned out to be the best decision that I didn’t make,” she said. |
