Legendary Golf Coach Dianne Dailey Retires And Reflects On Three Decades At WFU

Wake Forest University golf coach Dianne Dailey announced that she is retiring. The move comes after decades at the helm of one of the university's most successful athletic programs.

Dailey's 30-year tenure is the second longest for any Wake Forest coach. Along the way her student athletes won dozens of team and individual titles, and several ACC Championships. The team qualified for 15 NCAA Championships under her guidance, and it was Demon Deacon Jennifer Kupcho who became this year's national champion.

Dailey says that the accolades that she and her team have received have been great, but it's the students who have kept her coming back year after year. The National Golf Coaches Association Hall of Famer and former LPGA Coach of the Year says she hopes to finally get to play golf in retirement.

She spoke with WFDD's David Ford.

Interview Highlights

On training for mental toughness:

Well, we spend quite a bit of time on the mental and strategic things with golf. We have practices every afternoon from 2:30 to 5:30, and mixed in with all of the technique and the swing instruction goes the mental things and how you think about the shot you want to hit and putting them under pressure. We do all kinds of games and drills with them trying to make sure that they can perform under pressure, and then when we play golf, the whole afternoon is about strategic placement. How do you want to play the golf course? What kind of shot [do] you want to hit? What kind of trajectory [do] you want to hit? How is the wind? What are the conditions?

One of the things we do in our short game is at the end of every practice we have a challenge, and usually it's a 10 to 12-foot putt and everybody has to make it in succession before we leave. And so, if anyone misses, you know, we just sit there and we keep on trying to make it. So, everyone goes through a lot of pressure. The first time we tried this we were out there for two hours [laughs] trying to get it done. And now they can finish it up in 15, 20 minutes. So, it really makes a difference. And I think some of those putts they have at the end of a tournament that they have to make, all of a sudden, they've been under that pressure and they know they can do it.

On what has kept her coming back to coach for 30 years:

I find my motivation in the students. They are always different every year. You know, you would think after 30 years a job just gets to be the same old thing, but it's not, because the students change and I have to change with them, and I'm always trying to learn new ideas about how to teach and how to connect with them and how to help them get better. The technology is different every year, and I have to keep up with that, but it's the students and what they do and how they develop as people - that's really the aspect of my job that I like the most. I mean I like teaching golf but also like teaching them hopefully life skills and just to be responsible accountable young adults.

On the art of teaching:

I want the students to learn to make decisions for themselves and to be able to accept those decisions and then learn from them. And you know, in all of our practices and everything we do, the first questions we ask are: What have you learned today? What have you done to improve? What have you done to get better either golf wise or personal wise.

And I think if we can get in the habit of getting our students to say, 'what can we learn?', they use that as an opportunity instead of an excuse; they can't blame anybody. They can just say, 'What did I learn? I learned this and it was really good, or I learned about this failure and I'm going to do better next time.' You know, we're here to help you develop your personal skills. And we want you to use golf as a means by which to do that. So, the things that are going to help me be successful in life like discipline, focus, hard work, accountability and responsibility, we use golf to teach those lessons and along the way they get their golf better too.