Sister Act

Good grades as well as uniforms that are cleaned and pressed are part of Sister Lynn's game plan.

"I'm Sister Lynn," the woman replied.

What to make of an exuberant nun in a jogging suit, who coaches a game she doesn't play? A perfect fit? "Heather fell in love with Xavier Prep," Missy says. Heather went on to win the state individual championship three years running (1979 through '81), while leading the Gators to the team title her final two years, setting the foundation on which the dynasty would be built, one sister at a time. After Heather graduated, Missy won the state individual championship and Xavier Prep a third straight team title. Three more sets of sisters -- Colleen and Laura Draeger, Paige and Heidi Gilbert, and Lisa and Tricia Carriell -- won the next six state individual titles, each of them contributing to a team championship.

The familial structure on which Xavier Prep golf took form coincides neatly with Sister Lynn's notion of team as family. "It's about being a part of something," she says. "We work on having our kids love and respect each other. We want them to understand that friendships last longer than golf." She relentlessly promotes bonding until the vestiges of golf as an individual sport are erased and a team emerges.

For the first six weeks of the season, Sister Lynn does not allow iPods on the team van. When the girls are not electronically detached, camaraderie is unavoidable, evidence of which is the Xavier tradition of playing Big Booty, a silly rhythmic counting game guaranteed to evoke raucous laughter.

What's fascinating about this dynasty is that it largely has been constructed with players who weren't passing through en route to the LPGA. There are exceptions, Farr the first of them, until her career and ultimately her life were cut short by breast cancer. She died in 1993 at 28. Grace Park, who won the LPGA's 2004 Kraft Nabisco, attended Xavier for one year and won the state championship. Potentially its best player is Amanda Blumenherst, a Duke junior who was college golf's best player the past two years and twice the Arizona state prep champion.

Then there is Woods, who was introduced to the game in the same garage by the same man who introduced Tiger to golf, her grandfather Earl (her father is Earl Woods Jr., Earl's son from an earlier marriage). Cheyenne intends to play college golf at Wake Forest, after which she will pursue an LPGA career.

Otherwise, Xavier Prep hasn't produced the constellation that might be expected of a dynasty, but then golf isn't the measure of success there. One statistic trumps even the best golf scores -- it makes them irrelevant, in fact: 100 percent of last year's graduating class of 291 is attending a four-year college. "I didn't come here for golf," says Katie Allare, a senior headed for Notre Dame. "I came here because it offers the best education."

This is typically the lure that hooks golfers on Xavier Prep. The summer before starting high school, Blumenherst and her family moved from Indiana to Scottsdale. "We weren't sure of the school district there," she says. "Xavier Prep was prestigious academically. I wanted to go somewhere that would push me to another level academically."

The LPGA is Blumenherst's ultimate destination, though it would seem unlikely she would arrive without a Duke degree in tow. Even as it becomes increasingly apparent that Blumenherst's game is already sufficiently honed to take her there, Sister Lynn's insistence that her golfers finish college surely resonates across the years and miles that now separate the Blue Devil from Xavier Prep.

Sister Lynn is frequently insistent, incidentally. She has more rules than the USGA, some of them edible. The cost of playing golf at Xavier is four dozen homemade cookies (no packages of Oreos, please). The cookies are shared with opposing teams, as well as the staffs at the golf courses that provide playing and practicing privileges to Xavier Prep -- Camelback GC and Phoenix CC. Cookies are part of the values education that also requires each player to give a short thank-you speech to the board at Phoenix CC at the end of the year.

The players also are required to play 18 holes over the weekend and return to Sister Lynn the scorecard signed by their parents. They have to maintain a 2.0 grade-point average, with no failures and no incompletes. Their uniforms must be cleaned and pressed for every match.