By Kathryn Swenor
Last summer, Drew University announced that they will be adding their 19th and 20th intercollegiate varsity sports with the launch of men’s and women’s golf in the fall of 2017.
The teams will join the Landmark Conference and is the first expansion of the Rangers’ athletic department since swimming was added in 1995. Their home course will be Spring Brook Country Club in Morristown, which they will use for practices and tournaments.
Director of Athletics, Jason Fein, announced towards the beginning of the semester the addition to the golf team. These include Maura Ballard as the first head coach of the Rangers’ men’s and women’s golf teams. Ballard comes with 22 years of NCAA experience as the Director of Golf and Head Coach at Rutgers University. A 1988 graduate of Rutgers, Coach Ballard lead her team at Rutgers to 22 tournament wins and 20 individual championships as head coach.
Assisting Coach Ballard will be Joe Yeck, who played basketball and golf at York College of Pennsylvania. Yeck also works as the Assistant Director of Admissions for Drew.
For the men’s side, Drew will join Goucher College and Juniata College as new programs that will compete against Elizabethtown College, Moravian College, The University of Scranton and Susquehanna University. On the women’s side, there are also new programs at Goucher and Juniata to add to Susquehanna’s existing teams.
The University will become the second Division III school in New Jersey to offer women’s golf as a varsity sport, and the seventh Division III school in New Jersey with a men’s golf team.
