Editor’s Note: This story was originally published in November 2021. Anne Walker’s Stanford team would go on to capture the 2022 NCAA Championship in a 3-2 victory over Oregon, while top-ranked amateur Rose Zhang won the individual NCAA title. The Cardinal is the first No. 1 seed to win the team title in the match play era.
We all have an unworn sweater hiding somewhere in the depths of our closet. For Anne Walker, one of those still-tagged, undisturbed sweaters tells the story of how she has emerged as arguably the top coach in college golf, building the Stanford women’s program into the ultimate powerhouse.
It goes back to the summer of 2012 when Walker had unofficially accepted the job in Palo Alto, California, taking a massive leap from coaching UC-Davis to the job she dreamed of one day having. Overcome with excitement, she drove down to the Stanford campus with her soon-to-be husband, Chris, on the kind of idyllic day that breathes life into the stunning Richardsonian Romanesque architecture found on what is affectionately called “The Farm.”
“I was overwhelmed and kind of nervous,” Walker remembers. “Like, ‘Oh God, what have I done?’”
So naturally Walker, a former Cal Golden Bear who is in that school’s athletics hall of fame, wanted to buy something Stanford related to set the tone for this next portion of her life. But when she headed to the bookstore with Chris, she couldn’t bring herself to buy something.
“We met up after a while and he said, ‘Why don’t you have anything?’ ” Walker recalled. “And I said, ‘I’ve never owned anything red.’ UC-Davis and Cal were both blue and gold, so my whole closet was navy and gold. I was almost having an aversion to it. And Chris said, ‘Well you’re the coach now so you better get over your aversion really fast.’ ”
Walker bought a gray Stanford sweatshirt. She never took the tags off. For her, it represents that all of this is special. It can never be taken for granted how perfectly everything came together.
“I keep it because I want to remind myself how fortunate I am to be here with the path I have taken here,” Walker said.
More than nine years later, Stanford is nothing short of a juggernaut that could challenge some of the great college golf dynasties of all time. The Cardinal has reached match play of the women’s NCAA Championship every year since the format changed six years ago – they are the only team in men’s or women’s college golf that can claim the feat – and they’ve had a first-team All-American selection every season of Walker’s tenure. Her teams have won 27 full-field events, including the 2015 NCAA Championship. Last year they were the overwhelming favorites to take the national crown again, having captured the NCAA Stanford Regional by 30 shots and the NCAA Championship stroke play by 13 strokes.
It all revolves around Walker, the magnetic, humble and self-deprecating Scot. She is quick-witted and charming, the rare person that invariably lifts your spirit just by her presence.
Alas, a stunning quarterfinals exit has set the stage for this season’s squad, which is even more talented than last year’s. In fact, it may be one of the better teams ever assembled in the women’s game. The top-ranked Cardinal are led by dominant world No. 1 Rose Zhang, No. 3 and reigning NCAA champion Rachel Heck, No. 20 Angelina Ye, No. 24 Aline Krauter and fast-emerging Swiss freshman Caroline Sturdza. The supporting cast beyond those stars would be among the top players for most other Power Five programs. And future recruits, which include 2021 U.S. Women’s Open darling Megha Ganne, are sure to keep the success going.
It all revolves around Walker, the magnetic, humble and self-deprecating Scot. She is quick-witted and charming, the rare person that invariably lifts your spirit just by her presence.
College golfers tend to like their coaches, but Stanford players gush over Walker’s coaching prowess.
“She not only does everything she can to help us develop as golfers, but she pours her heart into helping us grow as people,” Heck told Global Golf Post. “She truly wants each of us to achieve our goals on and off the golf course, constantly being beside us offering love, support and wisdom … she is everything that each of us aspires to be.”
Stanford men’s golf coach Conrad Ray is one of Walker’s closest friends, and his lofty praise is perhaps the most telling of all.
“It’s pretty cool getting to be around the best college golf coach I know,” Ray said. “She produces champions. Her biggest skill is that she connects with people and I think that shines through in recruiting and it shines through with how her team interacts with each other. They set the bar for (the men’s team) … it’s consistent performance, which is hard to have these days in college athletics.”
And where does that come from? How did Walker arrive at Stanford with such self-awareness, empathy and knowledge?
It starts with Walker growing up on a farm in Lanarkshire, Scotland, about a 50-minute drive south of Glasgow in the countryside. Being an antsy teenager stuck at home, Walker found an escape when her parents gifted her a set of clubs for Christmas when she was 13 years old. The next summer, she played nearly every day at nearby Strathaven Golf Club, sometimes fitting in 54 holes while taking advantage of a robust junior golf program that featured several tournaments per week.
Socially, she found herself joining a posse of juniors who would hang around the club and “get candy from the pro shop and eat French fries for lunch” as Walker puts it. There was a constant sense of unsupervised camaraderie.
“It was like summer camp but everyone went home at night,” Walker said.
Her first round, Walker shot 132. By the end of the summer, she broke 100. A summer later, she was shooting in the mid-80’s. It was that summer when Walker convinced her mom to take her to the Scottish Girls’ Championship in Aberdeen. In the practice round, she played with two of the best players on the Scottish national team, Lesley and Pam Mackay, who were stunned that they had never met Walker before.
“That kind of affirmation spurred me on,” Walker said.
As a 16-, 17- and 18-year-old, Walker played for that Scottish national team and rose to being one of the best players in the country. By mid-July of her final year of junior golf, she was all set to play for the University of Edinburgh in the upcoming fall, staying relatively close to home.
That all changed during a local junior event. Belle Robertson, the famous Scot who played on nine Curtis Cup teams and won the 1981 British Ladies Amateur, had been contacted by Barbara Bentley, a San Francisco Golf Club member who had met Robertson decades prior, when the Curtis Cup was at SFGC in 1974. Robertson had captained that GB&I squad, losing 13-5 to the U.S.
Bentley told Robertson that Cal was an up-and-coming college team only a couple of years into existence and was looking to recruit their first international player. Robertson asked a group of girls, including Walker, whether they would be interested. Walker immediately raised her hand and connected with Nancy McDaniel, Cal’s coach at the time. McDaniel came over to the UK on vacation with her husband and watched Walker play for the first time.
“I played the best round of my life,” Walker remembers. “She was trying to be all cool and said, ‘So do you always play like this?’ And I said, ‘Oh yeah, I sure do.’”
By early October, Walker had decommitted from the University of Edinburgh and prepared to move to California. She scrambled to take the SAT and found her way to Berkeley by January of 1998.
Walker graduated on a Saturday. Two days later she started as an assistant coach at Cal, beginning a six-year run as a coach for the Bears.
Walker starred for the Golden Bears, becoming the school’s first all-conference honoree in the Pac-10 and captaining the team for her sophomore, junior and senior seasons. The team improved every year, culminating in Walker finishing top 10 in the NCAA Championship her senior year.
“It was a beautiful window of time where every day seemed to be a new record being broken,” Walker said. “To be captain for three years, I kind of had the thought, ‘Well, I’m not repulsing people at least so maybe there is something here to be a coach.’”
Walker graduated on a Saturday. Two days later she started as an assistant coach at Cal, beginning a six-year run as a coach for the Bears.
The team won seven tournament titles her first year as a coach and reached an all-time best ranking for the program. That success opened opportunities in the subsequent years for Walker to be a head coach somewhere else, but she declined the offers.
“I had already up and left Scotland with all my close friends and family,” Walker said. “And then I made a bunch of new friends here in California. This idea that I would root myself somewhere else again, it didn’t sit right with me. I just decided to be patient.”
When the UC-Davis job opened, Walker didn’t hesitate. The school is about 45 minutes away from Cal and was closer to a couple of her close friends from college. There was a learning curve in becoming a head coach at a school that, at the time, did not have a budget for extensive recruiting – or even an assistant coach.
The roster was massive and needed to be broken up into varsity and junior varsity squads. Walker came in and asked every member of the team to write down the top eight players who should make varsity and six players who should be on JV. A true blind vote. The results determined the teams.
“They joke about it now,” Walker said. “It was like some version of a TV show where they were getting voted on or off the island. It actually worked out really well because some of the JV kids busted their butt and ended up making varsity. But would I do that again now? Probably not.”
“When you coach, it’s partly about the school you are representing but it’s truly about the kids. You just end up loving the kids so much.” – Anne Walker
Walker’s creativity and work ethic led to three consecutive Big West titles for the Aggies and vaulted them as high as No. 13 in the country despite some big disadvantages. She probably would have stayed longer, but the job she had circled for many years finally came open. The seven-week interview process overlapped with wedding planning, but the stress was worth it.
The longtime Golden Bear had crossed the Bay Bridge onto the other side of an intense rivalry, although Walker never saw it that way.
“I didn’t give that any credence. When you coach, it’s partly about the school you are representing but it’s truly about the kids,” Walker said. “You just end up loving the kids so much.”
Which brings everything back to that gray sweater in her closet. Walker has taken an opportunity to coach at a special university and lifted the program into the same sentence as the Wake Forest men’s teams of the 1970s.
When you rattle off all of the stats about how dominant the program has been, Walker’s response is even more startling: she doesn’t keep track of such stats.
“If you didn’t just tell me, I wouldn’t know,” Walker said. “That record you just said is just a reflection of the players we’ve had, being immersed in the process every day. People tell me when we have great players that it must be hard to manage the team. No, they are just great people. We always try to recruit the person first and the golfer second. If you get the right person, good things are going to happen.”
The same could be said of Anne Walker as a coach. If you get the right person, success takes care of itself.
It’s a magical formula, and there is no sign it will stop.