Northwestern Women’s Golf Team Wins NCAA Championship

Congratulations to the Northwestern University women’s golf team who, though the calendar read May, marched through tough competition to win the 2025 NCAA Championship.

The NCAA women’s golf regionals started on Monday, May 5, and ran through May 7 across six regional sites. Twelve teams and six individuals not on those teams competed at each regional. Each region sent five teams and the top individual golfer not on an advancing team to the championship site at the Omni LaCosta Resort & Spa in Carlsbad, CA; a total of 30 teams and six individual golfers made it to the final tournament site (May 16-21).

The Wildcats drew a spot in the difficult Norman (OK) regional which included the 2024 defending national champions, Stanford, who were the number one seed in this regional. The Wildcats were among 5 teams to advance from this regional to the championship site, as did Stanford.

At the championship site in Carlsbad, CA, the NU golfers made the cut from 30 teams to 15 teams through 3 rounds of stroke play, slipping from second to third place after the fourth round, but gaining a spot (as #3) in the elite eight and into the start of match play. The quarterfinal round saw all four top seeds come away with victories. The number three seed Wildcats won a close match, 3-2, over the number six seed Arkansas.

It was another close victory in the semi-final match when the NU women ousted the overall number two seed Oregon women, with a narrow 3-2 match play score.

The championship final was no less tense and close for the NU ‘Cats. Stanford junior Megha Ganne had a 5-and-4 win in the lead match, while Hsin Tai Lin of Northwestern scored a 3-and-2 victory in the second match. Laura Nguyen put the Wildcats within sight of the championship with a 7-foot birdie putt for a 1-up victory over Paula Martin Sampedro in the third match.

That left Northwestern needing only one more point from either Dianne Lee, who was 3-up with five holes to play, or Elise Lee, who engaged Stanford’s Kelly Xu in a back-and-forth battle in match #4, which Xu won with a 1-up victory, evening the team score at 2-all.

With just one match remaining, and the team score knotted, Northwestern’s Dianna Lee was 1-up on the seventeenth green looking at a 12-foot birdie putt to win the match, but and pulled it, running it nearly 5 feet by. Should she miss the next putt for par the match would then be all square. She holed it to stay 1 up going to the 18th.

The par-5 closing hole amounted to a wedge contest with a stream guarding the green. Both players had about 18 feet for birdie. Lee’s uphill putt spun hard off the left lip and rolled 5 feet by. Stanford’s Revuelta left her downhill putt short, setting up Lee with 5 feet for the win – which she holed for a par, a halve, and a monumental victory.

The win marks Northwestern’s first National Championship in program history. Head coach Emily Fletcher and assistant Beth Miller have worked together to achieve this moment for 17 seasons at the university.

“More than doing what people didn’t think you could is this group believing what it thought it could do,” Northwestern coach Emily Fletcher said about her team’s never-give-up effort.