Strong winds challenged Duke in early spring but the team quickly adapted. The Blue Devils concluded their season with a 14th-place finish at the NCAA Championship.
In honor of Duke’s Centennial, the Blue Zone’s new Blast from the Past series highlights pivotal figures and events in Duke sports history. Next, we look at the stars that helped build Duke women's golf.
Duke finished the first three days in the top 15 and accordingly advanced to compete in a fourth round of stroke play. However, match play slipped out of reach as the Blue Devils failed to finish in the top eight after the additional day of competition.
Through the second round, the Blue Devils sat in fourth place, but slipped to seventh with a 3-over third round as the teams around Duke shot in the red that day. Evans tied for second place and punched his ticket to the National Championship as an individual.
With a second place finish at the NCAA Regional in Cle Elum, Wash., the Blue Devils have punched their ticket and are on track for the NCAA Championship. Duke jumped out fast among a 12-team field including top-ranked Stanford and ACC competitors Virginia and Virginia Tech.
The fifth-place Blue Devils left the ACC Championship, hosted in Wilmington, N.C., over the weekend, just one stroke behind North Carolina, the fourth-place finisher and match play qualifier with the highest score.
Duke came in second at the Old Barnwell Match Play in Aiken, S.C., this week after defeating Florida State and Mississippi State and tying South Carolina over three rounds of match play. The Gamecocks claimed the top spot in a tiebreaker based on total holes won over the round against the Blue Devils.
The team wrapped up the final day with a record-breaking score of 30-under-par, 834, and had three golfers among the top ten individuals, including freshman Katie Li who claimed the first overall spot.
Joined on the leaderboard by top-ranked teams like North Carolina, Alabama and Virginia, the Blue Devils, led by sophomore Ethan Evans, rallied on to fifth place, securing their eighth-consecutive top-five finish at The Hat.
Duke struggled with consistency across three rounds, facing challenging winds on the latter two, but had its share of positive showings and moments nonetheless.
Early this week, Pinehurst No. 2 hosted the Blue Devils at the Wake Forest Invitational, who tied for fourth place out of 12 teams, including national powerhouses Auburn and East Tennessee State.
Duke finished joint-fifth at The Prestige, hosted in La Quinta, Calif., this past Wednesday, the sixth-consecutive time the Blue Devils have finished in fifth place or higher so far this season in what is shaping up to be a great spring campaign.
The team traveled to Melbourne, Fla., for three days of competition — with one day off in the middle due to inclement weather — against top programs like LSU, Florida and Wake Forest. Duke’s 13th-place finish marked a tie with Alabama and placed the Blue Devils towards the bottom of the 17-team field.
There's good reason to feel confident given the steady growth Duke showed last season and flashed over the course of the fall. But it has yet to be seen how high this team’s ceiling is, and with limited sample size, this group is still somewhat of an unknown in the larger ACC picture.
The Blue Devils are entering 2024 energized and prepared for the invitationals and ACC play to come. After barely missing the cut to advance and finishing 18th in the NCAA Women’s Golf Championship, Duke put in the work over the fall.
The Blue Devils went down to Georgia and found themselves in that exact position, as Duke rallied Sunday to cap off a fifth-place finish out of 15 teams in the Golf Club of Georgia Collegiate in Alpharetta, Ga.
The Blue Devils bounced back in this tournament, finishing with a respectable 21 under par and a total score of 843, showing notable improvement from the week prior.
Down 10 strokes to North Florida in the middle of the third and final round of the NCAA Norman Regional, Duke managed to pull off the spectacular comeback, finishing the event with a total team score of 21-under at 843 total strokes.
At just the right time, Duke is playing its best golf, and has a chance to make some noise.
Duke ultimately placed fourth in stroke play at 4-under to advance before falling in Sunday’s match play semifinals to Georgia Tech.
