Newly Founded Women's Program Top Notch Program
In the Fall of 2005, after Carla’s men’s program finished 1st and women’s team finished 2nd at SCAC Championships, they received high praise from arguably the most famous, and the most popular magazines in the country. Golf Digest created a pair of college ranking leaderboards to for prospective college athletes across the country.
These leaderboards were separated into athletics and academics first universities. Not only did Trinity find itself a top the recruiting leaderboard for academics, but under Carla’s leadership the women’s team found themselves standing proudly next to four Ivy League schools, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Brown, in Golf Digest Magazine’s Top-5. The ranking system for the leaderboard was based on the team performance both individual and collectively over the 4 preceding seasons, as well as the University’s selectivity ranking in the Princeton Reviews 2006 college admissions guide. The climate of the area surrounding the university and the quality of the team home course also played roles in the ranking, however the last two areas collectively only made up 10%. When asked for her reaction to the news that Trinity had been ranked among the Ivy’s Carla’s former assistant coach Therese Bass said “Whenever you are up there with the kinds of schools that are on that list, it just shows what a great university Trinity University is. The girls that play golf at trinity are great golfers, but they are seriously academic minded, and that’s first.”
Talking with Carla her thoughts were that “those girls had done a great job, especially since we had just been developing a women’s team in the few preceding years.” While celebrating the woment that made up her team, Coach Spenkoch underplayed her own role in developing incoming talent, and creating an environment that stressed success in the classroom as well as on course.