This year is Coach Jeff Swanberg’s last year coaching CK’s Girls’ Golf team. He has coached the golf team for a total of thirteen seasons.  This season, Swanberg has seen the largest team in a while, with twenty-one girls.

Not too far from here, Swanberg attended Fife High School, and joined the golf team his freshman year. “I picked it up only because my brothers played on the golf team,” he said. He continued golf in college.

Swanberg has been coaching a sport for fifteen years. He explained, “To begin with, I stepped in to fill a need. I don’t think I wanted to be a coach. There was just a need at the baseball level. It was interesting. It was backwards. I thought I was stepping in to fill a need, and what I found out, coaching filled a need for me.”

Swanberg said that he has coached his own kids before. He coached all three of his sons’ baseball teams, as well as his daughter’s and two of his sons’ soccer teams. Currently, in addition to coaching golf, he also coaches Ridgetop Middle School’s soccer team.

When Swanberg explained what he learned throughout his coaching career he said, “Coaching year after year, I learned more and more things on what I enjoy about coaching, and what I found was it was cyclical. The more I dove into the enjoyment of it, the more the teams responded by enjoying it.”

Swanberg has seen the accomplishment of the Girls’ Golf team winning second in the state when Erynne Lee won state champion, and her sister, Katie, went as well. He said, “I will never forget that.”

“More important to me are the away van trips. My favorite memories are listening to the girls sing, chat, and giggle. I totally enjoy that. It’s just more important to me than anything,” he said.

Coaching golf for thirteen seasons, Swanberg was bound to miss many aspects of the team. However, the one thing he will miss the most is, “Easily, the players. I have said it for every year that I’ve coached, it is like adopting, in this case, 21 daughters. I just love them. So, I’ll miss them,” he said, in tears.

This season, the golf team has seen record breaking numbers

His advice to future golf players, “My advice to them is enjoy the sport but enjoy the experience more. Work at it, try to be better, do all that. More important to me is developing the friendship. If you go speak to anyone who is thirty and older, and ask for memories when they were younger, almost always they will tell you of their high school experiences, not their college ones. Somehow the bonds and ties and the friends and the relationships you make in high school last longer that the ones you make in college. I would love to see the girls develop this and make them as strong as they can be.”