USCB golfer works hard at improving her game. ‘I just kind of want to be known.’

Conditions were not ideal for Ashleigh Mead heading into this year’s NAIA Women’s Golf National Championship.

It had rained for two days before the first round of play at Lincoln Park West Golf Course in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and the weather interrupted the University of South Carolina Beaufort sophomore’s preparation.

“We didn’t get to warm-up that day, the range was closed, and we didn’t get a practice round,” Mead said in an interview with The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette.

“The weather in Oklahoma City was really terrible,” USCB men’s and women’s golf coach Cory Cottrell said. “It was just a few days of sitting and waiting and not really being able to get out there.”

Mead had never played the course before and, understandably, was nervous before the first hole.

But Mead shot a 75 and finished three strokes over par on the first day. She built on that first day’s performance with back-to-back under-par rounds, and after finishing two under on the third and final round, Mead ended the tournament eighth out of an initial field of 156 — the highest placing student athlete from a South Carolina college or university.

“I realized after the (first) round there’s no reason to feel the way I was feeling because if I just do what I know how to do, I’m going to be fine,” Mead said.

From softball to golf

Mead, now a rising junior at USCB, first picked up a golf club when she was 2, a plastic set for kids, but she actually started playing for real in the ninth grade.

Golf was not her first or best sport entering high school. Mead had played softball since she was 5, and at Union Grove High School in McDonough, Georgia, her .373 batting average propelled her to be 247th in the nation and 83rd in the state.

But it was a familial connection that drew the Georgia teen to golf.

“I picked up golf [in the] ninth grade because my dad had played it when he was younger, and I wanted to be like my dad,” Mead said.

Her family joined a local golf course and Mead started taking the sport seriously. It was a difficult transition from softball to golf, she recalled.

“Golf and softball, the swings are similar, but they’re completely different,” she said. “I would play softball in the fall for school and then go to golf in the spring. And that transition was super hard. I’d hit terrible shots, just because they’re actually very different swings.”

Mead managed to adjust her game, and her sophomore year she decided she wanted to pursue golf instead of softball. As her high school career ended, Meade wanted to play at the collegiate level, too.

She created an online account of her golf highlights to market her game and emailed “every single school in the entire United States” looking for an opportunity. Meade was contacted by then USCB head coach Brittany Dabule, one of the few coaches to reply to her inquiries, and she invited Mead to visit the campus.

Mead said she had been drawn to the university, in part, because of its location.

“I actually got to play with her and the team for a couple holes, pretty much a tryout, and she got to see the potential I guess that I had,” Mead said. “She (Dabule) was like, ‘I’ll take you,’ she just trusted me that I would do what I said I would do and get better at the sport.”

Dabule said Mead was not a polished player but showed she had a lot of raw talent during the visit.

“I could see a lot of potential in her,” Dabule said in an interview. “So just spending the day with her and just talking with her and her family, that’s actually when I made the decision to invite her to be a part of the team.”

Cottrell was an assistant coach when Mead joined the Sand Sharks as a freshman, and he, too, saw the potential.

“Ashley is a tall, very athletic, young lady. When she first came to USCB, you could just tell that all the pieces were there,” Cottrell said. “She just needed to continue to get tournament experience and really learn what collegiate golf was all about.”

Developing her strengths

Mead went through a “learning curve” freshman year, Cottrell said, but finished her sophomore season leading the team in every statistical category, finished tied for sixth at the Sun-Conference Championship, and was named All-Sun Conference.

Compared to her NAIA competition, Mead acquits herself well, too. She is 31st in the NAIA average score and 28th in subpar strokes per round.

Mead’s greatest asset is her driver. When she is firing at all cylinders, Mead’s ferocious 100 mph drives average about 265 yards.

“I’ve always been a long-ball hitter,” Mead said. “I think a lot of it’s from softball just because when I first started playing it didn’t matter where the ball went I was trying to hit it as hard as possible and that’s just how I grew into the game.”

Treating practice like competition also has taken some of the stress of playing out of the game, Mead said.

“When I practice with my teammates will will play games. Just things like that to keep it more fun,” she said.

Mead is in the off season right now, but has a couple of goals for her junior year.

“I want to just be more consistent in terms of score, keep them a little lower so that I can continue to place higher in these tournaments,” Meade said.

“I just kind of want to be known. If you go to a tournament, the other teams like know who you are and be like ‘She’s playing in the tournament.’”