Bamberger Briefly is sponsored by Charles Schwab, host of the annual Charles Schwab Women’s Collegiate Invitational.
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In 2019, Steph Curry, noted golf nut, NBA star and philanthropist, announced that he was making a major financial commitment to the creation of Division I men’s and women’s golf teams at Howard University, the academically elite and historically Black school in Washington, D.C. Major, and on-going. ESPN ran this bit of unlikely news at its bottom-of-the-screen scroll through the day. Innumerable people took notice.
Sam Puryear, a well-traveled golf executive and coach (East Lake, Stanford, Michigan State), was among them. Early in 2020 he was named as the director of both the men’s and women’s teams at Howard. The obstacles were formidable. The pandemic had disrupted the world. Howard had no established golf culture. He needed players with serious academic and golf credentials. But Puryear had two things going for him. He likes a challenge. And anything Steph Curry does commands attention.
Unbeknownst to Puryear, three teenage girls in three different states were drawn to the announcement pretty much as he was. All three girls were serious golfers and serious students. They met at Howard in August 2021 at freshman orientation, at the start of the first year that Howard had two full golf teams with full schedules. They’ve been a threesome ever since. In May, the three women — Makenna Rodriguez, from South Florida; Jada Richardson, from suburban Atlanta; and Kendall Jackson, from greater Houston — graduated from Howard together.
This week, they’re scattered. Kendall, as an amateur with plans to turn pro, is playing in an Epson Tour event near Hartford. Jada, who will matriculate at Howard’s law school next month, is attending a massive international gathering of her sorority, Delta Sigma Theta. And Makenna is preparing a paper she is presenting at the University of Pittsburgh, entitled “Comparative Analysis of Bonding Materials for Conductive Stability in Micro-Invasive Neural Arrays.” She plans to pursue a Ph.D. in a related field. A medical degree could follow. As Tiger likes to say, it’s a process.
Makenna and Jada are break-80 golfers. Kendall can break 70 on any given day. They all giggle with joy when they recount a team trip to St. Andrews. There is seldom a day when each does not know what the other two are doing. (The wonders of the group text.) They know each other’s eating habits. (All three are fussy eaters.) They know each other’s families and family histories. (Makenna’s father is an Ashkenazi Jew — that is, of European descent — who lived in Venezuela before moving to South Florida.) They all know how Coach Puryear feels about intra-team dating: “I completely discourage it,” he said in an interview. But the three ladies will tell you: Even Coach P., a man with a considerable presence, cannot stop young romance dead in its tracks.
Kendall played in the U.S. Women’s Amateur last year. On Monday, she played in the qualifier for this year’s Amateur. Jada and Makenna knew about her first-hole bogey almost as soon it happened. (The wonders of the Golf Genius app and its real-time scorekeeping.) She missed by a bunch. She was up before dawn on Tuesday, flying from Houston to Hartford for the Epson event.
Puryear sees a Nobel Prize in Makenna’s life-in-science future. He sees years of LPGA golf in Kendall’s. And a career as a powerhouse attorney in Jada’s. All three women talked about the inspiration they take from Steph Curry, as an athlete and humanitarian, and from Kamala Harris, a 1986 Howard graduate who made her concession speech last year at the university. Howard University, named for a Union general in the Civil War, has been widely known and respected since its founding in 1867. But to have a presidential candidate and an NBA legend associated with the school has meant that the three young women, and their coach, don’t have to tell the story of the school over and again anymore. As Washington has Georgetown and American and Catholic on its college roster, it has Howard, too. The Bisons.
Earlier this year, at the Lady Bison Invitational, Kendall had a second-place finish. She took second in the National Collegiate Women’s Championship as well. She was pleased and disappointed, too. She had two sets of shoulders to lean on.
“We’re always there for the other,” Jada said. “I really think we always will be, for the rest of our lives.”
For some years, there has been a plan for Howard golf to make a popular public course in D.C., Langston Golf Course, named for a former dean of the Howard University Law School, the Bisons’ home course. But Langston is in the throes of an evolving renovation project, and Puryear has established relationships with four private courses near the university. His golfers skip from one course to the next to practice and play on any given day. “We need to practice on fast greens,” he said. Fast greens, practice tees with short-game areas, courses where you can get in late-day, nine-hole practice rounds in less than two hours. He is competing for golfers with low handicaps and high GPAs with other college schools that often have a university course. The arrangements he has made with these private clubs are a lifeline for him.
But what Puryear has come to find out, when recruiting female high school golfers of color, is that Howard sells itself. That’s the bigger truth — and the biggest one. The student body is about 70 percent female, and about 70 percent Black. All over the country, but particularly in California and Texas, Puryear is finding Black girls from country-club families that are shooting 78 or better that want that kind of environment for their college experience.
Their high school lives are often very different from that. They know that post-college life is likely to look very different. But to come to Howard, as a golfer and a student, and to be on a campus where you expect to see other Black women, is a welcome thing. Puryear often finds himself recruiting girls that cite Howard as their first choice. In the summer of ’21, he signed up a girl from Georgia, a girl from Florida, a girl from Texas that way.
“What I heard was, ‘I want to be the best version of me I can be, I want to make a difference, I want to change the world,’” Puryear said.
Over the course of four years, those three girls — Jada Richardson, Makenna Rodriguez and Kendall Jackson — turned into teammates and soulmates. They turned into three members, among 3,200 others, in Howard University’s class of ’25.
Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com