THAT WINNING FEELING
LINKS PLAYERS MAGAZINE 2018 ANNUAL EDITION
By Jeff Hopper
When Andrea Gaston lost her mother at 15, she found refuge on the golf course. But not only there. Gaston, the Jewish girl from the Catholic neighborhood, started worshiping with the Mormons. And already you know how curious this story might be.
For the past 22 seasons, Gaston has been the women’s head golf coach at the University of Southern California. She came to it with little aspiration for the job but with a marvelous golf pedigree.
Gaston played college golf at San Jose State University, overlapping her late 1970s career as a Spartan with Juli Inkster’s. Inkster won the California State Amateur in 1981, then went on to a long career of LPGA Tour success, including seven major championship titles. Gaston went to work.
After her collegiate career at San Jose, Gaston moved back to Southern California and completed her degree at Cal State Northridge.
“There was never a question about finishing college and graduating,” Gaston says. “From there, the people I had met helped me get into the business world.”
She stayed in that world for seven years at one job, then seven at another. Then came the itch. When coaxed by a friend to play again, she started to wonder if maybe there was a way to get back into the game she had loved when she was younger.
“A friend from church enjoyed the game and she said to me, ‘Maybe we can go out and hit some balls and play one day.’ I said, ‘Oh sure, let’s do that.’ Little did I know that that decision made way for a new beginning.”
Once a competitor, always a competitor? It would be hard to argue in Gaston’s case. Throwing herself back into the game with every extra hour, she captured back-to-back state amateur titles in 1993 and 1994—in her mid-30s. To put this in context, future LPGA star Dorothy Delasin won the California State Am in 1996 when she was 16; a year later, Natalie Gulbis won at 14. This was not a tournament for 30-somethings.
But amateur golf caused dilemmas for Andrea Gaston the businesswoman. “I loved amateur golf,” she affirms, “and wished I could continue that, but it was very costly and I missed a lot of work every time I was qualifying for tournaments. I said, ‘No, the only way I’m going to really know if I can do this is to take it on full time.’”
So at this late stage, Gaston made a play at the pros. “That’s where I said, ‘Lord, if I do well and flourish out there and you have me be successful, I’m going to stay out there. But if not, I know that something good will happen on the other side of this journey.’”
What happened in short order was that USC’s head coaching position opened up. Gaston heard about and applied for the job, then landed it.
“I knew when I got the job there was no question I would put my clubs down,” she says. “Competition for me was over, but it was going to be a much bigger dream to work with a bunch of young ladies and try to develop our program.”
Anyone who has ever coached knows quite well that the competition was not over. Instead, Gaston would be leading the young competitors in her care. Together, they would set their sights on winning. Without question, Gaston’s teams have done that.
Under Gaston’s leadership, the USC women have won three NCAA Division I team championships and five individual championships. They won the prestigious East Lake Cup last November, only weeks before the Trojans’ top two players succeeded at the LPGA Qualifying Series and turned professional.
Pivots like this aren’t easy, especially mid-season (college golf plays a split schedule, with tournaments in the fall and spring). But Gaston recognizes it as part of the new landscape of collegiate golf. The best players want to play for teams like USC, but they also want to make a career in the game. So you just keep recruiting.
In the end, coaches like Gaston end up with a big, diversified family. Young adults make their decisions—mostly for the right reasons—and she adjusts, not sweating what she calls “the small stuff.” She’ll tell you that “every event and every relationship happens for a reason, a season, and on those special occasions, for a lifetime.”
Gaston says her highlights through the years are “absolutely the relationships.” While she calls the life of student athletes a blessed one, Gaston recognizes the immense pressure to perform, not only for yourself but for your teammates and coaches. It can wear on a young woman, and this is when a coach’s caring is more significant than her expertise.
“Maybe they’re at a point where they’re thinking about quitting or the stress of academics, trying to keep up,” Gaston says, describing a player who feels the weight of the game. “With all the stress that they’re feeling, I’m trying to help them through those situations and help them gain perspective—again, take each moment and try to embrace and appreciate the life that they’re living. My hope is that they will come to appreciate that ‘from those to whom much is given, much is expected.’ The Bible tells us that adversity is one’s ability to strengthen their walk with God. This is why I try to encourage them to embrace adversity and grow from each trial, test, and the temptation to not give up.”
In time, players are gone. They qualify for the LPGA Tour early or they graduate. Some play professionally, some go into business, some make a home. And then there are others who, like Gaston, turn their attentions to giving back.
“In the end I’m happy for the kids who make it on Tour, and good for them if they get out there. But I’m really happy for the others that have gone on to be successful either in their field of work or having kids, being married. It’s great to watch them grow up.”
Time and distance take players from a coach, and new players take their place. Under Gaston, they all have the same goal: Get a “natty.” Win it all. What they gain as well, whether or not they are aware of it, is a lifelong circle of support.
In the spring of 2017, when players’ eyes are turned toward conference championships, regionals, and nationals, Gaston found that this support was there for her, too. It just took her a while to know when to draw on it, afraid she might upset the delicate balance that governs a team focused on their hopes.
In March, Gaston was diagnosed with uterine cancer. It was not a good time, but cancer doesn’t tote a calendar.
After reviewing the results, the doctor said, “I want to schedule you for surgery in April.”
Gaston replied, “OK, you know my job. I’m a coach. This is what I need to know: If we’re early enough with this, will I be at risk if we postpone the surgery until my season’s over? I’m now in the thick of it, April and May, and it’s going to really be distracting if I have to have this surgery in April, because I won’t be available. And who knows how everybody reacts to that.”
The doctor asked for the dates. “If you go to the nationals, how late will you be done?” The NCAA Championship would end on a Wednesday in late May. Then the doctor said, “All right, we’re going to schedule surgery on that Friday.”
Gaston agreed to a battery of tests to be sure the need was not truly urgent. “Hey, I’m not going to risk my life,” she told her doctor. “If there’s something that says you’ve got to do the surgery sooner, I know that’s just what we’ll have to do.”
After the tests, they knew she could wait.
Gaston, however, did not wait complacently. She hit the gym, wanting to be in excellent shape when the surgery came. There were times when her players noticed her being unusually quiet or introspective, but she held back in telling them. For more than two months, only a small supporting prayer group knew what she was going through.
“I felt like that’s all I needed for the strength and support to get through what I was going through,” she says. “I was very confident with the doctors and even the diagnosis, and I really wasn’t afraid of it.”
As it turned out, Gaston just never seemed comfortable telling her players. Though the team had struggled through much of the season, they gelled once they got past regionals and made the national finals. They qualified as one of the eight teams for match play, then defeated Ohio State in the quarters.
Early Wednesday, two days before the surgery, one of Gaston’s players caught her coach crying off to the side. It was a rare moment when Gaston broke down. When her player approached and asked her if she was OK, she said, “Oh, I’m doing great. Everything’s fine. I can’t wait to get out there. Just stay focused and we’re going to have a great day.” It was nervous chatter from a nervy woman.
Against top-ranked Northwestern, the Trojans fought to the end, but an eight-foot putt stopped short on the first extra hole. Gaston’s ladies lost 3-2.
She gave them the time they needed to process the loss and for the media to disperse. Then she called her team together one more time and told them the news. She had cancer. On Friday, the doctors would operate. Then she added a dose of assurance: “Don’t worry. The diagnosis, everything’s good.”
Her team and coaches agreed to head home that night. In the meantime, the word got out, and Gaston’s big family—the players and coaches and friends she had shared her life with all these years—started texting and emailing and encouraging her. “Coach” was not going to go through this alone.
For herself, though, Gaston had a secret thing to savor: rest. “I just remember saying, ‘You know, in a day and a half, I’m going in for surgery and I’m going to have a good sleep.’” It had been a long three months.
Gaston was declared cancer-free in the weeks just after her surgery, and subsequent treatments helped secure that diagnosis. She was back on the job by the fall season, buoyed by her positive outlook and her faith.
It’s a faith she can only share so much on the job—at least with her words. But she finds opportunities for lessons that reach far back to those days when she was their age, finding her way.
The Latter-Day Saints church she attended in the years after her mother died gave her a chance to see healthy families at a time when her own had been shattered by death. And the Mormons were warm to Jewish people. Eventually, though, she found her LDS friends to be too insular, and she turned elsewhere. At Cal State Northridge, she had a professor who hosted Bible studies at his home with his wife. Some of the other students attended, so Gaston decided to attend. She will tell you, “This is when I started attending a Christian church and I really felt like now I was finding my direction.”
That direction has meant that a Jewish woman identified the Messiah to be Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish man himself, but the central figure in what has become Christianity. What he offered to her is what she wants to extend to her players—and what she wants them to learn to extend to one another—more than anything else: forgiveness.
“Girls in general at this age—and probably any age,” Gaston observes, “if somebody wrongs them or does something wrong, they’re so unforgiving and so quick to judge. I’ve had a lot of situations within the team where some kids want to chastise a player and they felt strong enough that they’d say, ‘What are you going to do about that, Coach? You should sit her for the next tournament.’ They would try to tell me what to do. I would always try to teach the lesson of the woman caught in adultery, when Jesus was saying, ‘You without sin, cast the first stone.’ I’ve always felt those were stories that I could tell to try and soften the hearts of these young women, because they’ve never had the exposure.”
She knows what she wants them to be exposed to, for it is her own story: “More than anything, my walk of faith has always been about having a relationship with my Lord and Savior, Yeshua, Jesus Christ, the Messiah. He is the one who leads my life and gives my life meaning and purpose. That is really the message I want others to learn for their own lives. Many think being a Christian is about religion and going to church. It’s far more than attending services every week. Undoubtedly, it’s important to come together with other believers and worship the Lord, but in the end, it’s about each individual’s relationship, their daily walk and prayer life. As the old hymn goes, ‘He walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own.’”
Gaston tends to limit her teaching to the stories of Scripture, and she admits to a bit of discouragement when it isn’t received favorably. She simply walks the walk.
She says, “Through my own life’s experiences, I always believed in arriving at a positive result where they would figure things out, realize what was most important, and that they could see the big picture and resolve any issues and learn the power of forgiveness. To this day, this message is still very important to me.”
Now Gaston has added one more story to her repertoire. Her own. For a group of competitors looking at the coach who leads them, it’s pretty hard to ignore a woman who has survived one of the harshest battles life can throw our way. So she’s telling that story, too, with one dominant hope.
“I think as I battled my illness, that’s when I really opened up publicly about my faith. I was more bold to be able to say that I’m thankful to the Lord, that I know he’s bringing me through this, and that he didn’t give me something I could not handle. I’ve had a lot of people respond very positively. I just hope that it helps somebody else to seek and want to know Yeshua (Jesus) is Lord and is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.”
COPYRIGHT 2018 LINKS PLAYERS INTERNATIONAL
Photo courtesy of University of Southern California. JohnKonPhoto.com