At this point in the spring, a single player is writing a significant chunk of the 2023-23 Notre Dame women’s golf story. Since the beginning of May, graduate student Lauren Beaudreau has earned All-ACC honors, won the NCAA East Lansing Regional and punched her ticket to the NCAA Championship.
The team season wrapped up just under a month ago with a 12th-place finish at the ACC Championship.
“Our fall was still a lot of learning — we were getting better, but the results didn't quite show. In the spring, we had a lot of good individual finishes, we had a lot of good team finishes and it felt like things were really coming together,” second-year head coach Caroline Powers Ellis outlined. “Unfortunately, the fall really sets your rankings up, so it might not look like we made a huge improvement from a rankings perspective from last year, but there were definitely a lot of triumphs we felt like with our team from an individual perspective, with our team scores and finishes in those tournaments.”
Despite the slow fall, the Irish made a major memory in October, tying for third at the first St. Andrews Links Collegiate Invitational in Scotland.
“That whole tournament was incredible,” Powers Ellis said. “To be involved in year one of it — I'm really excited for the other teams that will get to experience it in the future — but for us to be part of the inaugural year was so cool.”
Powers Ellis also noted that competing toe-to-toe with the highly-ranked Vanderbilt and North Carolina at St. Andrews set the Irish up for spring success.
Such success materialized in the middle of March when Notre Dame turned in a fourth-place finish among a loaded Tulane Classic field.
“I think the Tulane Classic was a pretty monumental week for us,” Powers Ellis said. “We played great to start off, and we hadn't been in that position in a while, and so day two showed a little bit of those nerves and uncertainty and questioning of things. But then, halfway through that second day and into the third day, [we] definitely played a lot better. And so I think that experience really helped our team prepare for The Bruzzy.”
At The Bruzzy, which served as the team’s final regular-season event, Beaudreau broke through. After going top-five twice earlier in the spring, she won with a score of three under par, leading the Irish to place second as a team.
“Lauren has been an incredible player the last two years,” Powers Ellis said. “For her, when you're at that level, it's such small things that show up to make you feel like you're really making progress. And so she was in contention so many times and was always knocking on the door, so to get that win at The Bruzzy, it felt long overdue to us as coaches.”
It’s no secret that Beaudreau has built significantly on her win at The Bruzzy. She will compete at the NCAA Championship from May 17-22 at Omni La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad, California.
Outside of contributions from Beaudreau and senior Chloe Schiavone, Notre Dame has relied largely on youth. Three of the team’s seven golfers from the 2023-24 roster are freshmen, two of whom competed in the ACC Championship.
“That was the hard part of this year,” Powers Ellis said. “I thought our freshmen did pretty well this year — there's always a learning curve of getting used to college golf and everything that goes along with it, and I think, especially for all of them coming from warmer areas, it was a little bit of a transition to get used to indoor training [and] how to translate that onto the golf course.”
Powers Ellis also expressed plenty of hope and excitement for her young golfers and their next steps. With four more freshmen set to join the program in the offseason, she and the Irish approach the 2024-25 season with development in higher demand.
