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Dawn Svenkeson (Scandia, Minn.) |
Dropping 13 strokes from your average would be considered a huge improvement
for any golfer. Lowering your score by 19 strokes from the first match
of the year to the last would also be considered a tremendous advance.
Such was the case for senior golfer Dawn Svenkeson, of Scandia, Minn.,
who has proven herself to be the type of dedicated player helping to raise
the bar in MIAA women’s golf.
This season, Svenkeson finished 16th in the MIAA with a stroke average
of 90.4, a remarkable improvement from her 22nd-place finish and 103.8
stroke average from 2001, when she started golfing for Calvin as a freshman.
After starting the 2004 season with a score of 100, Svenkeson shot a career-low
81-stroke round in the 2004 MIAA tournament. It was the highlight of her
season and a great way to end her collegiate golf career.
Her 2004 season average placed her third on the top Calvin women golfers’
list. It would have placed her first if not for two other record-breaking
Calvin golfers this season—juniors Annie Huizenga, of Hudsonville,
Mich., and Margare Tassaro, of Carnegie, Pa.
With her 2003 season average of 94.2, Svenkeson also holds 10th place
among all top Calvin women golfers. As a result of her and her teammates’
successes, Svenkeson has seen the team average of strokes per round fall
from over 400 in 2001 to 371.8 in 2004.
But Calvin women are not the only MIAA golfers who are setting records
and raising the standard. The whole conference has improved. Svenkeson
believes this is a good situation and said that she was “very happy
to be part of a developing program.” Svenkeson hopes that Calvin’s
team grows with more dedicated players so that they can step up to the
challenge posed by other MIAA teams—namely, St. Mary’s, which
finished first in the conference. Calvin finished fifth.
Svenkeson learned to golf from her father, who began to play a lot of
golf while she was in junior high school. As a result, she joined the
junior high school team and continued to play at Forest Lake High School.
She chose Calvin because it was one of the few Christian colleges with
both an engineering program and a women’s golf team. During her
time at Calvin, Svenkeson has appeared regularly on the Dean’s List
and twice earned a spot on the MIAA’s Academic Honor Roll. She will
graduate in May with a degree in mechanical engineering.
Though she plans to find a job after college, golf will not cease to
be a part of her life. “I will miss the competition at the college
level, and I know it will never be the same. I will never have a reason
to dedicate that much time to golfing … [but] I hopefully will continue
to play, possibly in a league,” Svenkeson said. |
