<p>A golf career that started at The Legends is coming full circle.</p>
<p>Crystal Morse, who got her start at the Franklin course more than a decade ago, will soon become its first-ever female head golf professional.</p>
<p>She’s looking forward to continue her longtime working relationship with The Legends director of golf Ted Bishop, who encouraged Morse to enter the PGA program after she graduated from college in 2003.</p>
<p>“It’s going to be a real natural fit for me, and for Ted,” Morse said. “I’ve known him since I was a teenager playing high school golf against his daughters.”</p>
<p>A Center Grove graduate, Morse was an all-conference golfer and two-time team captain at WKU before coming to The Legends and working two years as a PGA apprentice. She then moved west and spent nine years as the assistant professional at The Lakes Country Club in Palm Desert, California, earning her PGA credentials in 2009.</p>
<p>Morse then became the lead teaching instructor at The Club at Morningside in Rancho Mirage, California. In 2015, she and her husband Jim (also a PGA professional) decided to move back to Greenwood with their two young children. Since then, she has worked at The Legends as the player development director, focusing primarily on bringing more juniors and more women into the game, while also serving as the girls golf coach at Whiteland.</p>
<p>For Bishop, promoting Morse was an easy choice.</p>
<p>“She’s very high energy,” he said. “She’s very organized. She’s just extremely committed to everything that she does, and the way she’s grown our junior program in two years has been incredible.</p>
<p>“For me to have the opportunity to bring her into a leadership role in my golf operation … there is no one that I could have hired that I would be more excited about having as a head golf professional than Crystal.”</p>
<p>It’s still relatively rare for women to get a chance to rise into head pro positions, and so the significance of this moment is not lost on Morse at all.</p>
<p>“It means a ton to me; it really does,” she said. “Because I always feel like the golf business is definitely still a man’s business, and I feel like any woman in the golf business is constantly having to break through those barriers as a female professional.</p>
<p>“We do know, obviously, about the golf game. We’re completely competent. Females are completely competent to be head professionals and in the higher roles in the golf business.”</p>
<p>Morse is hopeful that she can inspire more young females to pursue careers of their own in golf.</p>
<p>“This is one way to show them, hey, you work hard enough, you can work your way up into any position that you want to,” Morse said.</p>
