For Erica Shepherd, the down side of not playing high school golf was that she hadn’t gotten to experience the feeling of being a part of a team since she played basketball in elementary school.
She’s making up for lost time this spring.
The Center Grove graduate, now a sophomore at Duke, has fully embraced the camaraderie that comes with collegiate golf as she heads into her first NCAA postseason — especially since the ongoing COVID-19 restrictions have made athletes even more dependent on their teammates.
“I feel like we’re really like a family this year, just … how much we’ve been through dealing with all of the COVID protocol and stuff,” Shepherd said.
Through a combination of togetherness and elite talent, Shepherd and her Duke teammates have been thriving during an unconventional season. Second in Golfstat’s team rankings after winning the Atlantic Coast Conference championship, the Blue Devils find out where they’ll begin their delayed quest for a national title repeat during Wednesday’s NCAA selection show (2 p.m., Golf Channel).
When Duke won the 2019 NCAA championship, Shepherd was watching from a distance, still a few days away from graduating from Center Grove. Next month, after a longer-than-expected wait, she’ll finally get to be a part of the show herself.
“It seems like just yesterday I was watching them win the national championship on TV,” Shepherd said, “so just all of the hype surrounding being defending national champions for two years now, and being a part of what makes Duke so special and seeing it firsthand, I’m definitely excited to get out there and play it for myself.”
This spring has provided several opportunities to ramp up for the main event. Shepherd won her first individual collegiate title at the Gamecock Intercollegiate in early March, shooting a 7-under-par 209, and she helped the Blue Devils run a gauntlet of three stroke-play rounds and two match-play battles to win the ACC title in Greensboro, North Carolina a little over a week ago.
Shepherd believes that running the table in a conference with five top-14 teams will help to prepare the Blue Devils for a potential weeklong test at the NCAA championships in Arizona May 21-26.
“The place that we played at, Sedgefield, they have a pro event there and it was just a really great course,” she said, “so I think that it really brought out the best golf in a lot of the good players. It was definitely a grind; it was not an easy course to play at. … The greens reminded me of Augusta, just with how fast they were rolling and how hard they were.
“It was a really good preview of what we needed to do for nationals.”
Shepherd also faced the back-to-back challenge of playing in a tournament with Duke last month immediately after competing in the Augusta National Women’s Amateur last month — but that was a welcome workload when compared with what her freshman spring looked like.
A year ago, Shepherd was back home in Greenwood, working on her game by herself and taking classes remotely after her season and school year were both curtailed by the onset of the pandemic.
Campus life in Durham, North Carolina still hasn’t returned to normal, but that’s made Shepherd even more grateful to finally have some teammates to share her experiences with.
“We’ve definitely gone to the extremes as far as preventing the spread and being cautious,” Shepherd said of the protocols in place at Duke this school year. “We get tested every day, and even when we’re gone we get tested, even if we’ve had the vaccine. So it has definitely been a very isolating experience, but that’s why I’m super grateful that we have the team that we do, that’s super close and stayed positive through it.”
She’s hoping that four weeks from today, they’ll be hoisting another trophy together.
