CMU Women’s Golf Team Gets a Boost Over the Competition
Partnership with PXG Golf pays dividends
By Tom Lang
Junior golfers look at many factors when choosing a college to play at the next level.
In the case of the Central Michigan Chippewas, coach Jim Earle has the blessing of being able to dangle the free PXG golf equipment carrot in front of wide-eyed recruits.
Back in 2019, Renee Parsons, a CMU graduate and wife of PXG founder Bob Parsons, arranged for CMU to be added to the PXG University Program along with the likes of Duke, Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, Southern Methodist, Washington and Vanderbilt – a very elite group of college golf programs.
Each university involved is outfitted each year with all new clubs, or at least parts replacement like heads, shafts and grips; whatever each golfer may need.
“It feels like you are a Tour player with a contract for clubs; our girls get treated like the pros do,” Earle said, now in his 4th season with the Chippewas. “It’s quite a great thing that the Parsons family and PXG Golf does for collegiate golf.
“It’s a great relationship with PXG to work with my players to help them get into the best possible fitted equipment that’s going to maximize their golfing ability and potential.”
That same season in the fall of 2019, CMU – which re-started its women’s golf program from scratch in 2014 – had two 3rd-place finishes. This past autumn the team played in five tournaments and won three of them. The Chips also took second at Eastern Michigan and grabbed an additional third-place finish. Quite the change of fate in a short time frame. Earle said the team record vs. all the D1 universities combined at those events in the fall of 2021 was 43-2.
Junior Zoe Vartyan, who came to CMU from Austria to play, said she didn’t know about the PXG relationship when she was recruited at just about the same time. But she knows today’s recruits notice for sure, “100 percent,” she said.
“Recruits definitely hear about the PXG clubs we are getting, and they get super excited,” Vartyan continued. “I feel like it’s a big thing to help with recruiting. It shows that a huge company like PXG trusts us to be a good enough program to represent them, and (recruits think) if PXG trusts them and they are actually performing, that’s a big component and maybe that’s a program I want to be part of.
“People are looking when we play with PXG clubs, and that makes you feel cool about yourself with PXG clubs in your bag. And it’s a confidence booster that they are giving us their clubs and we’ll hopefully do good things with them. It helps us a lot, because without good clubs it’s definitely harder to perform well.”
Vartyan placed first on the Austrian Juniors Golf Tour in 2018 and in 2017 before becoming a Chippewa.
“It’s just an unbelievable resource for my players to have access to,” Earle added. “And players at this level with all their practicing and college play and summer play can go through three sets of wedges in a year. It’s a great resource for us and we do not take it for granted. The list of the other universities in their program is a list of who’s who, and for our mid-major program to be in that is just awesome.”
