Sister Act

By John Strege
Photos: J.D. Cuban November 2, 2007

The golf coach at Xavier College Preparatory in Phoenix occupies an office down a long hallway that pictorially pays homage to women of note, including Mother Teresa, Rosa Parks and Margaret Thatcher, none of whom could break 90. Isn't that the point, if not the objective, of this pantheon, a reminder that there is more to life than golf?

The office is cluttered with the accoutrements of success that seem to argue otherwise: plaques and framed certificates of commendation, yellowing newspaper clips, photos of championship teams, a cluster of trophies and a simple handwritten note, the team's motto this year, that says, "We're going to push it to the limit, cuz we're in it to win it! Oh, yeah."

It is here that you find Sister Lynn Winsor, and she is wearing a golf shirt. You were expecting a habit? Sister Lynn has a habit, of course, several probably. Her most noticeable one is winning Arizona state championships. Xavier Prep has won 25 of them in 27 years, including the last nine straight, most recently in 2006 by 82 strokes. In 1989 its margin of victory was 191 strokes.

The Gators (wrong reptile for an arid desert, but, hey, they own this playground; it's their call) are odds-on favorites to extend their streak in the state championship next week in Tucson. Their best player is the defending state champion, Cheyenne Woods, whose Uncle Tiger is a reign-maker on another level.

Xavier Prep is an all-girls Catholic school that, along with all-boys Brophy Prep, anchors an older, nondescript neighborhood a few blocks north of downtown Phoenix. In a desert valley ringed with upscale golf communities, it might be the least likely place in the greater Phoenix area to unearth a golf dynasty.

Central to its success is Sister Lynn, who at 64 is inclined to slow down (painfully, by some accounts) only when she's behind the wheel. "We always laughed about her driving," says Missy Farr-Kaye, a former Xavier Prep star and now an assistant golf coach at Arizona State. "She admitted once to dating a race-car driver in college. So it all made sense." That was B.C., as Sister Lynn likes to say. Before Convent.

B.C., she occasionally played golf. Then she took her vows, among them to give up the game, she says jokingly. "I don't know that I've ever seen a club in her hands," Farr-Kaye says. When Sister Lynn began coaching golf at Xavier Prep in 1974, she wisely left swing-plane minutiae to the gurus. Her own lesson tee operates on a higher plane, dictated, she says, by Christian values, and this is demonstrably the point: It's one thing that her players leave Xavier Prep as better golfers than when they arrived, but her mandate is that they leave as better people.

"Values, academics, activities and athletics all work to empower young women to become leaders and caring, successful people," Sister Lynn says in an e-mail message, reiterating a de facto mantra that is apparent 10 minutes into any conversation. Sit down to talk golf with her and life lessons come back at you, each of them further elucidating the game's rightful place. "If a kid says, 'All I want to do is play golf,' they're not a good fit here," Sister Lynn says. "If all you care about is golf, then you're not well-rounded."

As for winning state championships, well, it is not necessarily a mandate, though Sister Lynn's personality, however infectious, does not readily accommodate failure. "She hates to lose," Farr-Kaye says, which raises the obvious question: How would anyone know?

So Sister Lynn is no swinging nun. How was it, then -- sans a deep reservoir of golf knowledge, at a school without an athletic pedigree -- that she fashioned a dynasty that ranks among the most enduring in prep sports history? "It started when Heather Farr walked in my door," Sister Lynn says.

Farr-Kaye's older sister Heather was an eighth-grader and a precocious junior golfer in the Phoenix area, and her parents were shopping for a high school that offered an educational return on the private-school tuition they were willing to pay (Xavier Prep's tuition is now as much as $12,000 annually). Golf was a secondary consideration, but the family still wanted to meet the golf coach. When they encountered a woman in a jogging suit, they asked her where they could find Sister Lynn.