How the best players from European countries are building a Coastal Carolina program
The Coastal Carolina women’s golf team may have bowed out of the NCAA postseason on Wednesday, but a 34-stroke win in the Sun Belt Conference Championship is evidence that international recruiting is building the program.
The CCU women tied for 15th Wednesday in the NCAA Tallahassee Regional to end their season. The Chants improved each day with rounds of 309, 302 and 294 for a 41-over 905, but only the top six teams advanced to the NCAA Championship, and that cut came at 5-under 859, with Clemson advancing in a playoff over Wake Forest.
The top five teams at the regional were Alabama, Florida State, Furman, Arizona and Washington.
Junior Sena Ersoy from Turkey was the low Chant, finishing in a tie for 51st at 7-over 223, and senior Malene Krolboll Hansen of Denmark ended the best season and best career in program history with a tie for 59th at 225 with a closing 1-over 73.
The Coastal women reached an NCAA regional for the seventh time in school history and first time since 2015.
Coastal’s seven-player roster includes only one American in sophomore Victoria Parker from Lewiston, N.Y., who played in just one tournament this season. In addition to Hansen from Denmark, and Ersoy from Turkey, senior Damla Bilgic is also from Turkey, junior Marie Lunackova and sister freshman Frantiska Lunackova are from the Czech Republic, and sophomore Stephanie Henning is from Sweden.
“Obviously if we can get the best players in the state, the best players in America, we’re going to go for them first,” 10-year Coastal women’s coach Katie Quinney said. “But ultimately it’s just trying to win a national championship and getting the absolute best five players we can get.”
Quinney puts in the time recruiting international players. She has traveled to many junior tournaments in Europe to meet the players and their families and watch them play, and she’s getting the best of the best. Hansen, Ersoy, Bilgic and the Lunackova sisters are among the top-ranked female amateurs in their respective countries. Frantiska Lunackova shared an individual tournament title this season.
“Going to these [European] tournaments I try to find the absolute best players we can find that I know we can also make better . . . try to find the players we know we can make those half a shot to a whole shot a year improvement has been key for us,” Quinney said.
There may be more coming with less effort on Quinney's part. The pipeline for future European players has started to develop. “We go to as many tournaments as we can afford to get to, to make sure we find the right players,” Quinney said. “And since we’ve had some good international success they’re starting to find us a little bit, as well, so that’s nice.”
Quinney has found that among junior golfers who are capable of playing at a Power Five Conference school, it’s easier to get European players to commit to CCU. They even sometimes prefer a school the size of Coastal, as Hansen did, and the golf offerings of the Myrtle Beach area.
“If we have an international that comes and visits Power 5s and us, they don’t care about the name, they don’t care about the size of the football stadium, they don’t care about how impressive some other parts of the athletic departments might be at some of the Power Fives,” Quinney said. “They see us, they see that we have such a close family, they see all the practice areas we have, and we have 90 golf courses and we have the Hackler course right here on campus. And they’re more comfortable I think with the size of the school and seeing how close we all are. They know the transition is going to be really easy.
“With a lot of the Americans there are so many family ties to some of the big affiliations, and being in the South where college football still reigns supreme, so many of these young girls grow up and already have their hearts set on the SEC, or South Carolina, Clemson, Wake Forest or Duke. . . . they already have it in their mind that if they’re going to be good enough to play there that’s exactly where they’re going to go and we’re already kind of behind the eight ball with them.”
With the level of the program elevating, Quinney may be able to balance the team in the coming years by attracting more quality American players, particularly from South Carolina.
“I want better balance because the last thing we want to do is have the best player from South Carolina not want to come here because they feel they wouldn’t fit in culturally,” Quinney said. “But these young ladies are so phenomenal on and off the golf course when we bring Americans on campus they actually really are intrigued by what we have, I don’t think they’re threatened by it. Every year we try to get the best player in the state and we’ve had some good runs at them these last couple years.”
The international structure of the team may have helped the team camaraderie in the past couple years. Because the team members are so far away from home, they rely on each other more with their friends and relatives being absent.
“I think it helps [us bond] because we are all far away from our home and we’re trying to be good here. We want to see each other as a family because we are so far from our families,” Ersoy said. “We are so strange to this country. We have only one American on the team and she helps for the American culture with us. But also we always teach each other our own cultures, and it’s fun and exciting. I love being an international team.”
Ersoy is one of the great finds for Quinney. She transferred to Coastal after winning the national junior college championship last year.
Quinney found Ersoy and Damla Bilgic, who were neighbors in Istanbul and are two of the top four women’s amateurs from Turkey, at Iowa Western Community College. Bilgic is a class ahead of Ersoy and was a big factor in Ersoy committing to CCU. Ersoy said they attended the JUCO first because their high school degrees from Turkey didn’t immediately qualify them for a four-year school.
Her coach on the Turkey National Team advised her to attend college in the U.S. once Ersoy saw a number of coaches from the U.S. at larger junior tournaments in Europe, but that requires leaving family behind. The CCU women's golf team is her new family.
“Actually it was a little hard, but I prepared like two years for myself because I knew I would come here,” Ersoy said. “So it wasn’t that hard maybe because this was my dream. I’m really, really happy here.”
Softball concludes
The Coastal Carolina softball team (26-28) fell short of qualifying for the Sun Belt Conference Tournament being played this weekend, finishing ninth in the 10-team league with a 9-17 mark in its second season in the conference.
The Chants won four of their final six games to make a run at the tournament but fell 6-4 in the season finale against cellar-dweller Appalachian State (17-35, 4-20).
Freshman Courtney Dean of Indian Trail, N.C., was voted to the conference's first team after finishing the regular season in the top ten in the Sun Belt in six different offensive categories.
She was ninth with a .345 batting average, second with 15 home runs, third with 39 runs batted in, tied for second with three triples, and second with marks of 104 total bases and a .717 slugging percentage.
Soccer camps set
The CCU women’s soccer program will host a series of summer camps throughout the months of June and July.
There will be two youth day camps from June 11-14 and June 18-21 to help introduce the game to newcomers and develop those that have already started playing. They are for boys and girls ages 4-14. The first will be held in Market Common and the second at CCU. Cost for each is $125.
A girl’s residential camp from July 12-15 at CCU is for girls ages 12-20 and is geared more towards middle school and high school players who want to take their game to the next level. It costs $525 for those staying at the campus and $375 for commuters.
Registration and camp details can be found at www.ccugirlssoccercamp.com.
This story was originally published May 9, 2018 at 6:45 PM with the headline "How the best players from European countries are building a Coastal Carolina program."