Northwestern upsets powerhouse Stanford to win NCAA Women's Championship

CARLSBAD, Calif. — Can you be one of the greatest women’s college golf teams in history and not win the national championship? That is a question Stanford will forever face regarding the Cardinal’s ultimately bittersweet 2024-25 campaign.

Top ranked, unbeaten in stroke play for the season, and the prohibitive favorite at the NCAA Division I Championships, Stanford faced a Northwestern team in the match-play final on Wednesday that finished 29 strokes behind the Cardinal in the 72 holes of stroke play at the Omni La Costa Resort & Spa. That’s close to Stanford gaining a stroke every 2½ holes. The margin was closer for the Wildcats at the Norman, Okla., regional, when they finished only nine behind Stanford over three rounds.

So, to review: 38 strokes of difference between the teams over 126 holes. If that doesn’t identify the deeper and more talented team, nothing does.

But none of that mattered when the championship moved to the final eight teams in match play. And with essentially nothing to lose—they didn’t have an alum like former Secretary of State and Augusta National member Condoleezza Rice cheering them on—11th-ranked Northwestern played loose, aggressively and ultimately with brilliance in pulling off the biggest upset on the women’s side of college golf’s match-play era.

The 3-2 triumph will be remembered as a thriller that went to down to the final hole and a final putt. In fading light, Northwestern junior Dianna Lee lipped out a firm birdie effort that would have secured the win and was left with a five-footer to save her match and her team’s hopes.

With hundreds standing in nervous silence around the green, Lee drained her second effort to beat Stanford freshman Andrea Revuelta, 1 up, and was overcome by a black and purple wave of teammates and coaches.

“You gave me a heart attack!” Emily Fletcher, Northwestern head coach the last 17 years, said as she embraced Lee, who made a similar par putt on the 17th hole to keep her one-hole lead.

“It’s surreal,” Fletcher said a few minutes later while standing on the edge of the 18th green. “Things are moving really slow right now. I don’t think it’s hit any of us.

“I think more than doing what people don’t think you can do, I think it’s about doing what this group thought it could do. And that’s all they did. They didn’t go out to try to prove anybody wrong. They just went out to just be themselves and to just compete as hard as they could, and that was gonna be enough.”

The national title is the first for Northwestern, while Stanford was trying to win a second straight championship and fourth in the last decade. No other team has captured more than one title in that time.

Stanford coach Anne Walker wore an easy smile while embracing her own players and congratulating the Northwestern team. After seeing her Cardinal fall behind early in three matches, Walker watched as they battled back to forge a 2-2 tie with the one matchup remaining. In both the quarterfinal and semifinals on Tuesday, Stanford also had to mount comebacks.

“There’s no lack of fight in this group,” Walker said, “and they had an unbelievable season that’s not gonna be forgotten, at least not on the Stanford campus, and I won’t let these guys forget.

“You know, match play, that's how it falls. And [Northwestern’s] short games are phenomenal. I saw some up and downs today that you would've counted them out, and all of a sudden, they were getting it to two feet. So they came out ready and they deserve that victory.”

Of course, Stanford’s season-long dominance that didn’t end in a national championship will be cause for debate about if match play is the most legitimate way to decide who wins the title. Walker laughed and said she’d have more championships if it was stroke play. But she also acknowledged that match play may be more appealing to fans and a primetime TV audience in the Eastern time zone.

“If we're gonna be in this business and we're gonna be part of golf, I think it's important that we continue to grow the game, appeal to the younger generation, the broader generation,” Walker said. “And if that's what this does, then I'm all for that.

“I just don't see how you're a kid sitting at home and not being excited to watch the way these women are practicing, hitting shots and cheering for one another. … I find it hard to believe that if I was 12 years old, I wouldn’t be waking up every day to practice hard to be a part of this.”

The Stanford women joined Arizona State’s team of two decades ago as the only squads to go unbeaten in stroke play for the entire season. Their only defeat before the final was a 3-2 match-play loss to Wake Forest in the ACC Championship after they set a record for the stroke-play portion of the tournament by shooting 27 under.

Northwestern’s victory capped a season in which the Wildcats had eight top-five team finishes in stroke-play tournaments and two wins.

All five of Northwestern’s starters earned All-Big Ten honors, with Lauryn Nguyen, a senior from Seattle, and Ashley Yun, a sophomore from West Covina, Calif., making the first team. Nguyen won the Silverado Showdown and became the first Wildcat to play in back-to-back ANWAs. Yun scored a win this season in the St. Andrews Links Collegiate and was second in the Norman regional.

In the final, Yun lost the first match 5 and 4 to Stanford junior Megha Ganne, while Nguyen countered with a 1-up win against Spaniard Paula Martin Sampedro. Hsin Tai Lin, of Taiwan, got the Wildcats another point with a 3-and-2 win over fellow freshman Meja Ortengren, of Sweden, who led the Cardinal during the season with the third-lowest scoring average (69.96) for a freshman in school history.

In the penultimate match, Stanford junior Kelly Xu won the 16th and 17th holes on her way to beating Elise Lee 1 up, and that put all the pressure on the Lee-Revuelta match. Lee never trailed and was 3 up with five to play, but Revuelta, a freshman who medaled in both the ACC Championship and Norman regional, won the 15th and 16th holes to cut the margin to one.

It was perfectly fitting that the final putt on 18 came down to Lee, the only local player on either team who went to high school 30 minutes east of La Costa.

“Absolutely incredible,” Lee said of the emotions she was feeling. “I am on such a high right now. Especially being in my hometown, it means absolutely everything to me. … You can’t even explain what it means to win a championship.”

Indeed, it’s going to take some time for anyone to take this one all in.