The future of NDSU golf began with a small wagon and two children sitting quietly, eating crackers and watching their father swing his clubs on an 18-hole course in the flood plain of the Red River. Oxbow Golf & Country Club in Oxbow, N.D., is where siblings Amy and Nathan Anderson — Nathan older by 16 months — learned how to play golf and how to be good students; they were homeschooled there by their mother. Now freshmen in the halls of NDSU, they are studying to be accountants, but outside of class, they play golf for the Bison. It’s in their blood; it’s like oxygen.

 

“I’ve basically been golfing since I could walk,” Nathan said, “and I’ve been serious about learning to golf my whole life. I can’t say there was a certain time I became more serious about it.” At the age of 13 in 2004, Nathan won his first Fargo-Moorhead Junior All-City Championship title. He did so again in 2005, when he also won the F-M Men’s All-City Championship and was a North Dakota state match play quarterfinalist. Nathan went on to claim the Minnesota Players Cup in the 13-15 boys division in 2006, as well as runner-up in the North Dakota men’s stroke play state championship the same year. He won the Birchmont in Bemidji, Minn., the North Dakota Bobcat Open amateur championship and the North Dakota men’s stroke play championship in 2008. In 2009, he became a North Dakota state match play quarterfinalist runner-up. As a freshman golfer for NDSU and through the 2009-10 season, Nathan has been a regular starter in team play, finding himself in strokes just behind team leader Nick Olsgaard, who is also a freshman.

 

While Nathan professes that he and Amy “have been around golf our whole lives,” Amy admits that she didn’t really like golf until she was 7 or 8. “But when I saw Nathan doing pretty good,” she said, “the competitive part of me started to kick in and I really wanted to beat him.” In 2004, Amy won the F-M Junior All-City Championship, which she repeated in 2005, and she also won the Minnesota Players Cup in the 13-15 girls division. Amy went on to claim the Minnesota and F-M titles again in 2006, also winning her first F-M Women’s All-City Championship title, which she held through 2008. That same year she placed 19th in the girls division of the PGA Junior Championship, placing 10th in 2009. She won the 16-18 girls division in the 2009 PGA Junior Series at Purdue and tied for eighth in stroke play in the 2009 U.S. Women’s Amateur in St. Louis, Mo., before being eliminated in the first round of match play. Her crowning achievement before coming to NDSU was winning the 2009 U.S. Junior Girls Amateur Championship with a 6-and-5 victory over Kimberly Kim of Hilo, Hawaii, in the match play final at Trump National in Bedminster, N.J.

 

“As far as Kimberly Kim goes, the thought of playing her was pretty intimidating,” Amy said. “I went into that match not even thinking about the possibility of winning, but I played really good that day.” She played well for six days, including 36 holes of stroke-play qualifying, where she was a medalist. Amy won six matches in four days to defeat Kim, who is a past U.S. Women’s Amateur champion. Nathan caddied for her during the tournament. Amy said after her victory, she spent 90 minutes giving interviews to national and local media, magazines and newspapers, and answering a lot of the questions related to how a girl from North Dakota could achieve such an accomplishment. “It was just different,” Amy said. “When people think of national champions, they think of people from California, Texas, Florida — the hot spots for golf.” Being from North Dakota is what piques interest in her, NDSU women’s golf head coach Matt Johnson said. “A lot of people think it’s pretty unusual that she’s from Fargo,” he explained.

 

Amy said on the one hand, living in North Dakota means “you don’t get burnt out” like other college golfers might. “I have friends in the southern part of the country and it’s hard for them to continue to give everything they can all of the time. A break in the wintertime is very nice,” she explained. On the other hand, picking up your game again in the spring means learning to make adjustments quickly, especially when you’re diving into competition at the collegiate level. “Chipping and putting requires a lot of feel, and that comes more naturally for Nathan,” Amy said. “I have to work to regain that every year.” But Nathan isn’t really worried about hitting the ball straight. “I can get that figured out in The Sports Bubble,” Nathan said. “The issue is distance control; I don’t know how far shots will fly and that will change from year to year.”

 

Amy’s achievement at the U.S. Junior Girls National Championship places her among only four North Dakotans to hold national golf titles, including Beverly Hanson (1950 Women's Amateur), Mike Podolak (1984 U.S. Mid-Amateur) and Shane McMenamy (1996 U.S. Junior Amateur). Locally, however, Amy is best known as being the first female to advance to the championship flight of the 2009 Pine-to-Palm tournament in Detroit Lakes, Minn., where she lost in the finals to Fargo South High School graduate Tom Hoge, who plays for Texas Christian University.

 

Now at NDSU, Amy won three straight tournament titles in the fall and shot a school-record 144 at Flagstaff Ranch in Flagstaff, Ariz. Her performance broke the former NDSU record of 147 set by Amanda Miller at the Salt Creek Golf Club in Chula Vista, Calif., last season. Amy is only the second player in school history to win three tournaments in one season; the first was Nikki Danielson, who won three times in September 2001 and is NDSU's career leader with four tournament wins from 1999-2003. Amy was named the Summit League Female Athlete of the Month for August and September.

 

When asked who is the better golfer, Amy is modest. “We each kind of have our strengths,” she said. “Mine is hitting and driving straight. Nathan is good at putting and chipping.” Nathan, however, isn’t as bashful about giving his younger sister credit. “If we played the same tees, most of the time I would win,” he said. “But if she plays the ladies tees, then she has me beat.”

 

The old adage that “practice makes perfect” is perfectly understood by the Anderson siblings and “knowing that practice is getting you somewhere” helps, too, Amy said. They both credit their practices with Dale Helm, an amateur golfer and student of the swing from Mayville, N.D., for much of their success. “A huge key to our success will be to continue working with the coach whom we’ve worked with for a long time,” Amy said. “Every person has a different philosophy of the golf swing and to change it at this point would not make any sense, because, obviously, what we have been doing has been working well.” Nathan knows Helms has a lot to offer. “It’s his philosophy,” Nathan said, “how he teaches the golf swing: The hips lead the shot. Maybe he gets more in-depth than some people do or maybe what he does works better with how we think we should do it.”

 

Besides having a good long-standing coach to return to, growing up homeschooled was a benefit for both golfers. “I would say it contributed a lot,” Nathan said, “because you can get a lot of golf time in even while you’re in school, because of the flexibility of your schedule, and you have the flexibility in the wintertime to work out when others don’t have time.” Amy said even though they are almost two years apart in age, both she and Nathan were able to enter college at the same time because of homeschooling. “My mom started to teach Nathan how to read and I listened in,” she said. “The next school year, when she started to teach me to read, I had already started reading. She put Nathan and I in the same grade and she thought I would have to branch off at some point, but I never had to, and so I graduated early.” Both said they chose NDSU to stay close to home and their golf coach. “I had a few options,” Amy said, “but, honestly, I never really considered them.” Nathan agreed. “It was just a natural choice,” he said.

 

Having been golfing competitively — and successfully — since age 13, it’s no surprise that both siblings are setting their sights on professional golf careers beyond college. In the meantime, both Nathan and Amy will push their respective Bison golf teams from the bottom up as freshmen. “I think it’s great,” Nathan said. “Any time that you have a team with freshmen doing well, it looks good for the future.”