Margaret Butts is prepared and ready for the NCAA Golf Championships

Photo by Centre College Athletics

Sophomore golfer Margaret Butts is not foolish enough to think there will not be teams at the NCAA Championships good enough to beat Centre College because some did during the regular season.

However, she’s also not afraid to say that if the Colonels play well that they could win the school’s first golf national championship.

“If we play well we are hard to beat,” she said. “We have put so much time and effort into this season and know we all hope that pays off.”

The Division III national championship is in Houston May 10-13. The Colonels finished sixth last year — the program’s second best finish behind a fourth-place finish in 2013 —and returned junior Rylee Suttor, Butts and Meaghan Grant off last year’s team. Suttor was ninth in the individual standings while Butts placed 44th and Grant 48th. Freshmen Grace Walker and Anika Rana will be playing in their first national championship.

“Having three people who played at the national championship last year is big because it is a draining week,” Butts said. “You have a walk-through and then four days of competition, something we didn’t have in any tourney all year. It’s harder than anything we do but also the most rewarding. It’s just a grind but it is exciting.”

The Colonels played a loaded schedule because coach Jane Hopkinson-Wood wanted to test her players. Butts said there was not a single tournament without good teams, good individual players.

“Seeing every good team at one time like you do at the national championship is different but we are not scared of competition,” Butts, a team captain, said. “We have played a lot of teams favored to win or finish high and know we can hang with them.”

Hopkinson-Wood constantly credits Butts’ leadership on and off the course as a big reason for the Colonels’ success. Butts “appreciates” her coach’s confidence in her and knows having a good attitude is a must in golf.

“Golf is so mental and it is easy to get down on yourself and the rest of the team. I do my best to always be positive. Even on bad days, we are still one of the best teams in the country,” she said. “One bad day of golf or one bad hole is not the end of the world.”

“If I am upset, I try to hide it because I am a captain. Eyes are on me and a lot of eyes are on all of us because of our success. Us setting good examples shows we want to be good and we are not going to let one bad day stop us. Every season no matter who you are there will be bad holes, bad rounds. You just can’t let it keep you down.”

She says if a player does not play well, the team gives her about 30 minutes to calm down before starting to try and figure out what went wrong and move forward.

“Once the round is over, we can’t do anything but try to fix what went wrong and play better the next round,” Butts said.

Butts, the Southern Athletic Association Newcomer of the Year in 2021, has not had to fix too many issues in her athletic career. In high school, she lettered in not only golf but also soccer, basketball and cheering at St. Mary in Paducah.

“I was a serious soccer player and it took a lot for me to give up soccer to play golf in college,” she said.

Playing both golf and soccer in high school forced her to learn time management skills  that have helped her at Centre since both sports were played in the fall. She also says playing soccer taught her about the “team concept” of sports.

“If you only play golf, it’s hard to look at it as a team sport but in soccer you have to lean on teammates,” Butts said. “In soccer, you are leading 25 teammates and that taught me how to play as a team.”

She is the all-time leading goal scorer in St. Mary soccer history but she was also regional golf champion. She still watches soccer but admits she doubts if she could play for the Centre soccer team.

“I thought I was good at soccer, but not that good,” Butts, class president all four years of high school, laughed and said. “My high school is very small. There were only 22 in my graduating class. So you played and tried everything.”

She played basketball as a freshman before switching to cheerleading her final three high school years.

“Basketball and cheerleading were more just for fun and to be doing something to contribute to my school,” she said.

She had a 4.0 grade-point average in high school but quickly admits she has had to put a lot more work into her academics at Centre. She wants to go to medical school or be a physician’s assistant.

“She is a neuroscience major — “That makes me sound fancy” — which is a mix of biology and psychology.

“My grades are important to me. I take my academics very seriously,” she said.

However, her focus now is on winning a national championship in Houston.

“I know we can do it. We all know we can,” she said. “Now we just have to show everyone else that we can.”