BELLINGHAM, Wash. -

Carver Memories -- Fall 2002

WWU's best female golfer was self-made

Katja Trygg never took a golf lesson, her high school career was non-descript and she was a late arriving walk-on at Western Washington University.

Yet, 11 years following her graduation, Trygg is considered the best to play the sport at Western since women's golf became part of the school's athletic program in 1994. She holds or shares school records for best season scoring average (75.4), lowest scoring round (69), tournament medalist performances (8), and top finish at nationals (5th).

During her senior season of 2005-06, Trygg was a first-team National Golf Coaches Association All-American for the second straight year and Western's Female Athlete of the Year as she helped the Vikings to the best campaign in program history, which included a third consecutive fifth-place finish at nationals.

Trygg `recruited' to Western

It was late September of 2002 when Trygg walked into the office of Dean Russell, then the WWU women's golf coach, who also was the head golf professional at the Bellingham Golf and Country Club.

"Being the head pro, recruiting was always the hardest thing for me because I couldn't leave the facility and really get down the road and talk to players," said Russell, who vividly remembers his first meeting with Trygg.

"I was just getting ready to lock up the pro shop and this young lady walks in, introduced herself and asked if she could try out for the team. Well, we'd just had walk-on tryouts the week before, but I found out a little about her high school career and that she already was enrolled at Western.

"The next day she brought her clubs and we went out on the range and I saw she had this repeatable golf swing with the sound and feel that I look for. So I said let's go play a few holes. We went over to the 11th tee and she parred four of the five holes we played, all from the white tees ... I asked if she would like to be on the team as a redshirt and she said great."

Just three weeks later, Russell was faced with a situation where the team was a player short for an upcoming tournament. He asked Trygg if she'd like to forego her redshirt season.

"She said yes and I remember the look of confidence in her eyes," he said. "I liked what I had seen on the golf course when she was practicing and the rest is history."

How Katja got into golf

Trygg did not start playing golf seriously until the eighth grade. Her father, Olof, was an avid golfer and being the oldest child, Katja became his sports buddie and would accompany him to the range to hit balls or occasionally to a pitch and putt.

"I never took lessons growing up, it was just (working with) my dad," Trygg said. "I watched a lot of golf on TV and I'm kind of a visual learner ... But I didn't really start playing until after we moved to Bainbridge (from Seattle)." Liking the game, Trygg decided to try out as a freshman at Bainbridge High School. She had a rough start.

"I was not very good my first year," Trygg admitted. "I'll never forget my freshman year at districts which took place at the Skagit Golf and Country Club (near Mount Vernon). I think I made 15 on the last hole and shot 129 or something. It was just miserable."

But she got better and as a junior placed ninth (87-84) individually at the Class 3A state tournament where the team finished sixth. And she was 14th (86-84) in medalist play at state as a senior.

While Trygg wanted to play collegiately, there was little interest shown by colleges from an athletic standpoint.

"I had applied to six or seven smaller schools in the Pacific Northwest, as well as the University of Washington and Western, and had been accepted by all of them," recalled Trygg. "I visited Lewis & Clark College (Portland, Ore.), which really wanted me to play, but they were a private Division III school and didn't have athletic scholarships.

"So I went to visit Western and I loved it. I mean everything about the campus just felt great. I can't remember if I talked to Dean (Russell) before I made the decision to go to school there. It certainly wasn't like, `Yes I'm playing golf at Western." It was nothing like that. So, I contacted him and went out to the country club one day and hit a few balls and he said sure."

Her game improves at WWU

During her four-year career as a Viking, Trygg lowered her scoring average by nearly 10 strokes.

What made for the improvement?

Initially, getting an opportunity to play against other collegians.

"Being in that environment was so helpful, competing against people at a higher level," said Trygg. "In high school the golf team was very laidback, so there wasn't always someone pushing me competitively. Being able to compete with such talented teammates on a daily basis and having that camaraderie built belief in myself."

Also helping her game was working and playing each summer at the Wing Point Golf and Country Club, a private course, near her home on Bainbridge Island.

"The course was extremely challenging and that really helped a lot," Trygg said. "I had always hoped (of becoming a top player), but it was not something that I necessarily thought would happen."

The 5-foot-6 Trygg does not attribute her success to any secret tip that drastically improved her golf swing, but rather to hard work and a belief in herself.

"My short game was definitely a strong point for me and my driving accuracy," she said in describing her game. "I never hit the ball very far, but I hit it pretty darn straight and if I missed the green I could get it up and down."

Trygg's scoring gets better and better

As a freshman at WWU in 2002-03, Trygg averaged 83.7 strokes.

A memory from that year was having to evacuate the course at Muskogee, Okla., for a couple of hours during the second round of the West Regional because of a tornado warning and severe thunderstorm.

The next season, Trygg lowered her average to 80.5 and placed 16th in medalist play at the National Collegiate Athletic Association Division II National Championships. The Vikings, making their first appearance at nationals since joining the NCAA in 1998, finished fifth in the team standings.

During that sophomore year, Trygg's game took a big jump when she claimed medalist honors at the WWU Invitational by shooting rounds of 73, 76 and 78 for a 54-hole total of 227. That was three strokes better than the three players tied for second.

"Taking medalist honors for the first time, that was my coming out party I guess," said Trygg, who went on to achieve that eight times. "From that point on, I felt like I should keep trying to do that."

Her play helped the Vikings to a 34-stroke victory, which propelled them to second place at the NCAA II West Regional two weeks later.

In all, Trygg posted 12 rounds under 80 during that campaign with seven coming in her last 10 rounds, the last three while competing for the first time at nationals.

As a junior, she was medalist in four tournaments, helping the Vikings tie for first at regionals, which were played at the BG&CC, and place fifth at the NCAA championships. She finished 15th individually at nationals, leading the Vikings with a season scoring average of 77.0, carding 21 of 27 rounds under 80.

"Even when she was the best player on the team, Katja never cared about being No.1," said Russell. "She just wanted to go out there and play great golf and help us win tournaments, and the individual stuff took care of itself."

"Katja had the complete package to be a great golfer. She had the competitive fire inside her, but played with a calm demeanor on the golf course and controlled herself emotionally."

Russell felt another thing helping Trygg was her outstanding work in the classroom.

"She came out to practice knowing that her homework was done and her grades were being kept up. And that made her more relaxed on the golf course."

And there was one more factor.

"I mean I just loved to play," Trygg said. "Nowadays, I would never play in weather that we played in back then. It was great even if it was hailing or raining. That served us very well, especially in our own tournament. It could be pouring rain and we would just play as well as we normally did. And the other teams would be going `Oh man, this is terrible.'"

Her career ends on high note

As a senior in 2005-06, Trygg averaged a school-record 75.4 strokes, which ranked fifth nationally, and recorded a career and school-best 3-under par 69 in the final round at the Grand Canyon Invitational. As a team, Western shot 287 in that round, also a school best.

Trygg placed fifth at nationals, the Vikings' previous best finish being 10th. She was tied for 11th after shooting a first-round 76 and entered the final round tied for seventh following an 80 in terrible weather conditions. She shot 74 in the final round for a 54-hole total of 230.

Taking over as Western's coach that season was Bo Stephan, who continues in that role to this day.

"Women's golf has changed over the last 11 years, but I still look back at Katja as the best player that I've had, just in terms of what she was able to accomplish at the regional and national levels," he said. "She was the ultimate gamer. If we'd had a strict (team) qualifier for tournaments, she wouldn't have made some of them. But when the lights came on, she was ready to go. Just an awesome person and an awesome player.

"She's quiet, but the golf team was her element. If you went to a public outing, you would think of her as being reserved. But when she was with the girls on the team that wasn't the case. That was her element and she was 100 percent comfortable in it."

That season, besides doing well at regionals and nationals, Western was victorious in seven of eight regular-season tournaments.

"It was just a good mix of people," said Stephan. "You had a person like Katja, who you knew was going to go out and play well. And there was a level of comfort there for the other girls because they could go out and do their thing always knowing that Katja was going to play well. And because of that, it freed people like Candice (Wagner), Katie (Bender), Allison (Gillette) and Catherine (Kim) to go out and swing a little more freely because they knew if they went out and played well that we were going to play really well as a team. That team was special ... That 287 we shot at Phoenix was a big deal."

Illustrating how close that Vikings' team got, many of the players were bridesmaids at each other's weddings.

Another recollection Stephan had of Trygg involved Drury (Missouri) University and its best player.

"We competed in a lot of tournaments with Drury and played a bunch of rounds against them. They also had a really good player - Tonya Choate (tied for DII Player of the Year honors, placed seventh at nationals). She ended up transferring to (Division I) UNLV.

"Katja played against her I don't know how many times that year. And it always was so funny watching them playing together because they were polar opposites. Tonya drank like a half-dozen Mountain Dews per round and was go-go-go, and Katja was just this mellow, laid-back people person and it was like these two opposite personalities were like two of the best players in the nation that year."

Trygg after Western

Trygg completed her degree in physical education, fitness and health promotion in mid-June of 2006. She then worked at Wing Point for two years, enrolling in a PGA program for teaching professionals.

"Ultimately I decided that wasn't what I wanted to do because when you work in the golf industry, you don't necessarily get to actually play that much golf," she said. "The schedule is also very demanding and I wanted to pursue other interests and have more time with friends and family."

Trygg returned to Western and while going to school was the women's golf assistant for two seasons from the fall of 2007 to March of 2009.

In October of 2013, Trygg married Chris Parrish, who works in the software industry and was a standout cyclist at Western. They now live in Bend, Ore., where Katja is a personal trainer.

"Now, I play seven or eight rounds a year," said Katja. "It's harder when you can't play for free and your time is more limited. There are quite a few good golf courses here ... I'm definitely starting to get the itch, but it's tough not practicing all the time and not playing as well as I once did. I definitely miss the competition."

Would she like to be involved in the game in another capacity someday?

"I would love to be a (head) coach," Katja admitted.

Before Trygg there were Lindor and Lockner

Lindor

Claudia Lindor took top honors at the National Women's Intercollegiate Golf Tournament in 1963. Playing at University Park, Penn., Lindor, a senior at then Western Washington State College, powered her way to victory in final-day action, June 19. The tourney included competitors from both NCAA and National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) schools. Previous winners included such famous Pacific Northwest and national names as Pat Lesser Harbottle, Anne Quast Sanders and JoAnne Gunderson Carner. Blisters plagued Lindor throughout and finally forced her to shed her shoes in the final round. It did not seem to affect her game. After tying for medalist honors in the qualifying round, Lindor won a four-way playoff with four straight match-play wins to claim the championship. The victory string began with an upset of the previous year's winner, Marianne Gables of then Los Angeles State College, and concluded with a 5 and 4 triumph in the final round. That achievement earned Lindor a spot among the Faces in the Crowd section of the July 8, 1963, issue of Sports Illustrated. A Bellingham High School graduate, Lindor was runner-up at the 1962 Washington State Women's Golf Association state championship and was inducted into the WWU Athletics Hall of Fame in 1980. The wife of Frank Uhrig, Sr., she passed away on Nov. 16, 2007, at the age of 68.

Lockner

Women's golf as a team sport began at Western Washington University in the spring of 1994 and the scoring leader in each of its first four seasons was Sherri Lockner, a graduate of Shorewood High School. Lockner earned NAIA All-America honorable mention as a junior in 1996 and again as a senior in 1997. During her final season, Lockner tied for 13th at nationals in medalist play and helped Western place 10th in the team standings in the school's first national appearance. As a junior, she tied for 15th at nationals. Lockner was twice a Pacific Northwest Athletic Conference and NAIA Far West Region all-star. She took medalist honors at four regular-season tournaments as a senior and placed among the top three in 12 of 19 tournaments during her four-year career. A 1997 graduate of WWU, earning a degree in exercise and sport science, Lockner had three coaches at Western, playing for Lynda Goodrich as a freshman, Steve Card as a sophomore and junior and Noreen Brown as a senior. After graduation, Lockner worked as a physical therapist and married Michael Fritz. Tragically, Lockner died in a car accident on Apr. 19, 2004, just two days short of her 30th birthday.

Written by Paul Madison who served 48 years as sports information director at WWU from 1966 to 2015