PRAIRIE VIEW — When Kacey Menyoli decided to come to Prairie View A&M, some opportunities made her college choice an easy one.
It was the chance for the former Ridge Point High School standout to continue her golf career, attend a prestigious HBCU, get an education, and pursue her medical aspirations.
Making history wasn’t part of the equation.
“Honestly, I’m happy that we’ve even gotten to this point, because this hasn’t happened before for our school. I think I can come away with whatever we do out there. I’m just happy we are out there. We are on TV, and everyone sees our name. They know of our school now.”
Prairie View senior Kacey Menyoli
But that is exactly what Menyoli and the Panthers have accomplished with an opportunity to add to history this week as the Prairie View women’s golf team competes in its first-ever NCAA Regionals in Waco. The Panthers arrived at this point after winning their first SWAC Championship in program history last month.
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“It feels pretty amazing to get to this point, especially since I’m a senior,” said Menyoli, who led the charge during the Panthers wire-to-wire SWAC Championship run in Alabama. “I’ve been playing on this team for four years. So it’s a pretty big accomplishment to finally win the SWAC and have a chance to perform well at Regionals.”
It’s a dream the Panthers didn’t really know they could dream until this season. With each stroke and every successful round during the three-day SWAC Championship, reality began to set in that Prairie View could accomplish something the program had never imagined.
“I’ve never won any sort of tournament before,” said Menyoli, who was named second-team All-SWAC this season. “So to perform that well under pressure, especially after the second round, it was really amazing, a great feeling to come back after the round and to see my teammates’ faces – men and women – to have all of that was really a good feeling.”
Now, the Panthers have a chance to build on the history made at the Regionals, which run May 11-13. They are in a stacked Regional that includes No.1 seed Texas A&M, Oregon, Baylor, TCU, LSU, and SMU. A top-five finish will advance PV to the national championships.
First-year coach Kortland Ware believes in his team’s chances to advance as long as the players remember that it’s the Ridgewood Country Club course at Waco Regional they are playing, not the seemingly stacked field.
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“The best part about it is that we are not playing other teams. We are not playing the top teams in the nation. We are just playing a golf course,” said Ware, who was named SWAC Coach of the Year. “Everybody is playing the golf course; there is no defense, there is no offense, there is no passing the ball because you’re not dribbling well. It’s you, and it’s against the golf course.
“You play the golf course well, add up the numbers, and there is a good chance we are going to make it to the next round.”
Arriving at that point and now facing the chance to advance further hasn’t come without some nuance and change. The greatest obstacle came last summer when they learned that their coach, Mesha Levister, had left the program to become the director of golf at North Carolina A&T.
The next challenge came when Ware was hired to replace Levister as the head coach of the men’s and women’s teams. Ware is an accomplished coach having elevated the Lincoln University program, but he was different from what the team was accustomed to.
Ware’s coaching style is more hands-off and … well, he is a man.
But over the course of the season, and with the results, what was at first a challenging transition has become smoother, if not completely smooth.
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“It was a little (tough) because I think we really liked Coach Mesha. She was a great coach,” said junior captain Briann Briggs. “But being able to achieve something this good under a new coach is also really a really good feat. That’s a positive side.”
Ware admits that the transition on the women’s side came with some challenges, but his approach was to be as transparent as possible and provide all of the support he could, especially at the competitions.
“The previous coach did a bunch of great things, but it is coming in and letting the team know that I am going to run through a wall for you,” Ware said. “There is no one here who is going to tell you what you cannot do. I am here 100% for you guys, but the flip side to that is if I am going to give 100%, then I need you to do the same.”
With freshman Fernanda Rendon as the only new contributor, Ware and assistant coach J.P. Thornton have relied on lineups this season that include returning players like Neveah Figueroa, Micaiah Joubert, Madison Williams, Briggs, and Menyoli. There has been steady growth among the players and consistent competition for the top five spots in each tournament.
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“It’s like night and day,” said Thornton, who was captain of Texas Southern’s Championship team in 2007and is now credited by the PV players for providing the detailed coaching they desired. “I got here probably right after their third event of the year, and looking at their scoring average, I think within the first … When they got back from the Bahamas, I was just looking at what they were doing in practice. I started developing stats, trying to keep stats on how they were doing, then trending, and from there I was kind of able to individualize their practice and really hone in on certain areas of their games that they needed to work on and to improve.”
Armed with that knowledge came growth and even some setbacks, including last month’s Women in Golf Foundation Tournament at Katy’s Cinco Ranch Club, where the Panthers finished a disappointing fourth in the all-HBCU competition, which featured teams they would have to face in the SWAC Championship.
Ware called it a wake-up call for his team.
“Every team that was in our conference beat us that day,” Ware said. “It doesn’t feel good to walk in our backyard and have everybody beat you.”
He reminded the Panthers that they were better than that performance and that they were facing a tougher course in Birmingham, which was better suited to their longer, more accurate hitters like Joubert and Figueroa, along with Menyoli’s precision. For the three rounds of the SWAC Championship, the Panthers collectively shot 29-over in each of the first two rounds and then closed with an 18-over on the final day to claim the title.
“It’s definitely a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It’s one of those things, after we just won SWAC for the first time, we are just going to continue to make history for this program. That’s a very exciting thing.”
Prairie View junior captain Briann Briggs
“It was a tougher golf course than our own golf course, and they played that much better,” Ware said of the RTJ Oxmoor Valley Golf Club course in Birmingham. “So that just lets me know that they can do it, and it lets them know. Then it puts them right alongside the best in the country.”
And it also puts the Panthers in a place they never thought they would be, and that’s in the Regionals with a chance to make more history.
“It still doesn’t feel real,” Menyoli said. “The whole team has worked as hard as we could, especially compared to previous years. We’ve put in the most amount of work. It’s nice that all of our work paid off. But it definitely doesn’t feel real.”
