For nearly 45 minutes on a cool February day, Jason Drotter patiently answered questions about the Cal State Fullerton men’s golf team, describing in his customary colorful detail his team’s strengths and weaknesses. When he was finished, Drotter — the program’s director of golf — abruptly switched gears and started talking about another golf team.
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“You should be writing on the women’s golf team. They’re the story. They’re going to be really good this year,” he said.
Turns out, Drotter called the shot of his colleague, CSF women’s golf coach Kathryn Hosch rather well. And, as these things go, Hosch called her shot pretty well.
“This season, I expected to be in this position. I was pretty sure we would have a good enough ranking to make it to the postseason,” she said. “We just came off an amazing season last year, and everyone came back. We knew what we were capable of.”
What the Titans were capable of — aside from making both Drotter and Hosch look like Nostradamus — was putting together one of the most successful seasons in program history. One season after qualifying for the NCAA National Championship as a regional 10th-seed, the Titans returned to the postseason as the No. 7 seed at the 12-team Stanford Regional, finishing ninth, with Davina Xanh finishing five strokes out of position to advance to nationals as an individual.
The Titans’ return to postseason came via an at-large bid — a plot twist we’ll get to in a moment. That bid came courtesy of a No. 43 national ranking, one of the loftiest rankings in program history. At one time, CSF was ranked as high as a program-best 36th, courtesy of seven top-five finishes in 10 tournaments, along with a team victory at the San Diego State Classic that came with Katharina Zeilinger’s individual title.
Speaking of Zeilinger, she joined Xanh and Kaitlyn Zermeno Smith on the All-Big West First Team, the first time in program history three Titans earned All-Big West First Team honors in the same season. Xanh, meanwhile, captured her second Big West Golfer of the Year honor in three seasons, becoming only the second Titan player (Martina Edberg being the other) to earn that award twice.
Of the Titans’ five seniors, four have tournament wins on their resumes.
Hosch carefully built the Titans for this moment, so her Big West Coach of the Year honor was well-deserved. She put together a schedule designed to get CSUF into the top-50 in the national rankings that usually earns a team a regional berth. And she created an atmosphere of process-over-results that tempered those lofty expectations coming from all corners with confidence in her players to execute the plan each tournament.
To illustrate how deep and how loaded the Titans were this year, Hosch literally had to ask Bryant Freese, the director of athletic communications who handles women’s golf, to help with her lineup for the Big West Tournament. This came about after a reporter came up to her at a tournament and asked to take pictures of her top three golfers. The first part of that equation was easy: Xanh, Zermeno Smith and Zeilinger.
But the second? Putting them in order? Yeah, that required some outside assistance.
“I asked him, ‘Based on what?’ If you go off the world amateur rankings, Katelyn is our best. If you go off average score, it’s Kathi. If you go off the college scoreboard ranking, it’s Davina,” Hosch said. “I was putting in my lineup, and usually I do my lineup based on who the No. 1 golfer is, then filling in two, three, four and five.
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“I had to go back on who No. 1 was. I had to figure it out heading into the Big West (Tournament). I finally went with Kathy as No. 1 because she had the best average score. But I literally had to look to my SID (sports information director) to figure it out.”
The only thing Hosch couldn’t figure out this year is what happened to the Titans in the first round of the Big West Tournament. Prohibitive favorites going into the three-round tournament at Royal Kaanapali Golf Course on Maui, the Titans stumbled out of the gate. An uncharacteristic 15-over-par opening round left them in seventh place in the nine-team event — 18 shots behind leaders UC Davis.
Zara Ali, an All-Big West Honorable Mention selection, led the Titans with a respectable 1-over-par 73, putting her in a tie for 12th. But Xanh and Zermeno Smith shot 76s, tying them for 27th. Zeilinger carded a 78 (T37). Louise Dahl, an 80 (42nd).
Xanh rebounded impressively, going 68-65 the next two rounds to tie for second (7-under), one shot behind medalist Madison Le of Long Beach State. Ali earned her best finish as a Titan, tying for fifth after a 74-69 finish. And CSUF climbed back into the mix, winding up third, seven shots behind winner Cal Poly and one behind runner-up UC Davis.
But there was a lesson coming with the rude Hawaiian awakening that Hosch — despite admitting to the heartbreak of not winning back-to-back conference titles — chose to take back to the mainland. Along with some dark humor.
“Apparently, we do things as a team at Fullerton,” she said, pointing out the teamwide slump in that opening round. “You can have one player play bad, but when you unanimously play poorly, it’s a tough hole to dig out of. “It was quite shocking to not only my team, but my competitors.
“Had we not dug ourselves that deep of a hole, we would have won again. It was a good lesson as well. Maybe this was what we needed. … As we debriefed a week after, we started to think about what is the lesson here? We were expected to win. We never said that as a coaching staff, but that was the underlying message. We played like we had to protect something, and we didn’t play our usual game. We played with fear.”
Hosch took that message — along with her team — to mental coach Neale Smith, a former pro golfer on several tours who worked with PGA Tour players such as Jason Day. A disciple of legendary sports psychologist and CSUF Athletics Hall of Fame member Ken Ravizza and a standout athlete who once high-jumped 7-feet-3-inches at the Australian Olympic Trials, Smith reiterated Hosch’s eternal philosophy to follow the process and not follow the leaderboard.
And Hosch reiterated how fun that process has been with this year’s team, one that everyone knew was coming.
“It’s neat to say three of my best players were here since they were freshmen and we know what the blueprint looks like, so we can do it again,” she said. “… It’s been a run, and it’s pretty remarkable we did what we did last year as juniors, and the fact they all came back is remarkable. That’s a testament to not just how well they played, but that they wanted to come back and do it again says something about them and what we’re doing at Fullerton.”
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