John Crooks – Syndication Server

John Crooks cements his Campbell legacy as Golfweek Fall Challenge marks his 100th title

Crooks has special feelings about Caledonia Golf and Fish Club.

John Crooks wonders if his personal feelings about Caledonia Golf and Fish Club have something to do with the success his Campbell women’s team has experienced there over the years.

“The first time I saw Caledonia,” he said, “it’s just one of my favorite golf courses anywhere.”

The Camels are a consistent contender at the Golfweek Fall Challenge, played annually at this scenic spot on Pawleys Island, South Carolina. Entering this year’s event, Campbell had won six team titles, with its first title coming in 2012, and finished runner-up twice.

Crooks’ personal history will be forever entwined with Caledonia after Campbells’ latest victory there on Sept. 10. It was Crooks’ 100th title with the Camels women’s team, a milestone that puts him into a very small club of women’s coaches with career victories in the triple digits. In fact, he and longtime Duke women’s golf coach Dan Brooks, with 143 career victories, are the only members.

Scoring: Golfweek Fall Challenge

“I’ve been doing it for quite a while,” Crooks said of his long coaching stint. “The first year we didn’t win anything and so there’s been 33 years to accumulate 100 and I’ve just been fortunate to be surrounded by some really good people.”

Crooks also oversees the men’s golf program at Campbell, and has guided that team to 61 team titles. The men competed at the Myrtle Beach Golf Trips Intercollegiate this week while the women were at Caledonia, so Crooks split his time between the tournaments.

Campbell’s women had to put the pedal down in the final round to reach this milestone victory for their coach. After 36 holes at Caledonia, they trailed North Carolina-Wilmington, the defending champion in this event, by three shots. The Seahawks are a team capable of going low, having blistered the opening holes at last spring’s National Golf Invitational before finishing runner-up there. Three players from that squad returned this week at the season opener.

The Camels began chipping away at their deficit immediately, with the squad’s counters playing the first three holes in 3 under. UNCW played them in 3 over.

“After about three or four holes, we started gaining momentum. Then they just started playing really well,” Crooks said of his team. “We made a lot of birdies today and we played well.”

The closing hole, a 377-yard par 4 with an approach shot over water, can present drama at Caledonia, but so can the par-4 16th, another tricky hole with a green protected by water on the right. They played as two of the three hardest scoring holes for the tournament. Campbell navigated them both in even par for a final test, but UNCW didn’t give up any ground there, either.

“We have had luck there, we’ve made some pars where we needed to and today they finished very well,” Crooks said. “I have a lot of respect for the 16th and 18th hole at Caledonia.”

Campbell was the only team under par in the final round, and the team’s 2-under 54-hole total left them five shots ahead of UNCW. Emma Bunch of New Mexico State won the individual title for her sixth win in her last seven starts, dating to last season.

Crooks’ team had no problem getting excited for their coach and his 100th victory. The Campbell campus in Buis Creek, North Carolina, is only 170 miles north of Pawleys Island, and initially they were ready to pile right back in the van and head home.

“I told them well it’s time for a celebratory meal and they said well we’ll just go back to campus and get something there,” Crooks said. “I said, No, no, no. We’re at Myrtle Beach. We’re going to find something to eat now’”

And so, the team sat down to a big Italian dinner fitting for the accomplishment.

At Campbell, men’s assistant Ashley Sloup and veteran head coach John Crooks team up as one of college golf’s most interesting duos

Campbell’s is a coaching setup not often seen in college golf, and Ashley Sloup credits head coach John Crooks for that.

For Campbell’s men’s golf team, Ashley Sloup lands somewhere between assistant coach and big sister.

“I’ve been able to build a relationship with each of the players and get to know them and what’s going on,” said Sloup, 25, who is in her second season coaching the Camels men’s team alongside veteran John Crooks, now in his 32nd season.

Campbell’s is a coaching setup not often seen in college golf, and Sloup credits Crooks for that. When previous men’s assistant Matt Moot took a job as the assistant coach at North Carolina State in February 2021, Crooks brought in Sloup as Moot’s replacement.

Crooks notes that Sloup is normally the only female in the room when coaches get together at men’s college golf tournaments.

“That took a lot of faith and a lot of trust,” Sloup said.

Sloup had known Crooks during her days playing college golf for Winthrop, which competes against Campbell in the Big South Conference. One day, Sloup reminded Crooks that they’d actually met a few years earlier. Both were waiting to pick up their U.S. Open tickets at will-call at the 2014 tournament at Pinehurst and Sloup had introduced herself to the coach – she was an incoming freshman and wanted Crooks to know they’d be seeing each other on the college circuit. Crooks was impressed by the interaction.

“I thought, most people would not have addressed that,” he said.

Ashley Sloup, Campbell’s men’s assistant (Photo by Bennett Scarborough)

Before taking the men’s assistant gig at Campbell, Sloup spent a season as the women’s assistant at Furman. Her first foray into coaching came at Northwood University, an NCAA Division II school in Midland, Michigan, where she worked with both the men’s and women’s teams.

Sloup is in a different realm with Campbell’s men, but there are similarities that she’s able to draw between coaching experiences. At Furman, Sloup was able to coach Natalie Srinivasan, the 2020 WGCA Player of the Year and ANNIKA Award winner. At Campbell, Pontus Nyholm, who has since turned professional, was ranked as high as No. 46 in the World Amateur Golf Ranking.

Sloup saw how differently men and women attack a golf course and learned the nuances of each side of the game.

“The guys thankfully have been so respectful, so welcoming, so inviting,” Sloup said. “I really kind of felt like I was this missing puzzle piece that they didn’t know they were missing.”

Crooks, who heads both golf programs at Campbell, ranks second among all active Division I women’s coaches in tournament victories with 90, which leaves him behind only Duke head coach Dan Brooks. Crooks is a self-described laid-back leader, and much of that likely comes from sheer time spent in this game. Sloup brings plenty of energy to the table.

“I’ve known about her and her personality and she’s a lot of the things that I’m not,” Crooks said. “I’m talking about her outlook. She brings and energy to the room.”

He remembers one of the first trips Sloup went on as his assistant. As soon as the van stopped, she was out the door trying to unload players’ golf bags.

The cup is always full in Sloup’s world, Crooks says.

“Every one of (the players), when you ask them would you like to have somebody walk with you, nobody has ever turned Ashley down,” Crooks said of his men’s team. “They’ve turned me down.”

Establishing an effective coaching dynamic with Crooks was easy, Sloup said. She appreciates the wisdom and experience as well as the deep southern delivery that make Crooks one of the memorable figures in college golf.

Asked for some of the most notable “Crooksisms” players are likely to hear in the team van, Sloup prefaced her response with a note about that accent.

“He’s so southern, so you have to picture in a very southern accent,” she said before quoting her boss: “’We have a saying on the golf team – un-lucky.’ And then he’ll say, if someone does something really good, he’ll say, “Oh my.”

Any player who tries to ignore the sage advice that Crooks has to give is likely to hear something along the lines of, “Well what do I know? I’ve only been doing this 33 years.”

Sloup has taken to calling Crooks by the nickname Yoda.

“She calls me yoda not for my knowledge, and that’s important,” Crooks notes. “Yoda is the oldest living creature she’s aware of.”

In turn, Crooks’ Star Wars-inspired nickname for Sloup is Padawan, a term used in the movies for an intern in training. Both terms are fitting in their own way.

“The best thing about him,” Sloup said of the learning curve under Crooks, “is not only is he preparing me to be a head coach someday, a top assistant at another big top program, but he’s preparing me and teaching me how to grow as a young woman and as a person.”

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College coaches were back recruiting at the U.S. Junior this week. A few in particular have a special connection to this event.

John Crooks and Tim Straub were back recruiting this week at the U.S. Junior, where they happen to be past champs.

Back in 2018, when then-Campbell-freshman Pontus Nyholm qualified for the 2018 NCAA Championship at Karsten Creek in Stillwater, Oklahoma, Camels head coach John Crooks orchestrated a detour. There was a scroll in Oklahoma City that Crooks wanted to see.

The player scroll is a familiar tradition for USGA championships, and Crooks knew that the one from the 1967 U.S. Junior at Twin Hills Golf Club would have his name on it – if it was still there.

“I called ahead and they were very gracious, met us and had carts for us,” Crooks remembered. “They showed me that I signed during registration for all the participants and then we rode by the golf course.”

Crooks’ run to that U.S. Junior title rarely comes up within his team, but it’s nice for the longtime coach of both Campbell golf teams to occasionally reference if he needs to drive home a point with a player.

Crooks spent this week recruiting at the U.S. Junior just up the road from Campbell. Walking the fairways at Country Club of North Carolina in Pinehurst, North Carolina, was a return to normalcy. For much of the past year, in-person recruiting was off-limits because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Because of COVID, I don’t know how other coaches felt but it’s just like I’ve just been standing in quicksand, there was nothing I could do, no place I could go,” he said. “To be able to walk the golf course and go up and down and walk nine holes and then nine more and then nine more, that’s what we’re supposed to do during the summertime, see players and be seen by players.”

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Crooks won his U.S. Junior title in his first and only trip to the championship when he was 17. He had a local caddie at Twin Hills – one who had just signed to play basketball on scholarship at a school in Oklahoma and who Crooks distinctly remembers being unfamiliar with how to tote a golf bag. He would often pick it up by the handle and carry it that way.

Crooks met Andy North, a three-time PGA Tour winner turned ESPN golf analyst, in the final and got an early advantage. He was 6 up when he made the turn and held on to that advantage even as North came to life on the back nine. Crooks won, 2 and 1, when he birdied the 17th on top of North.

“I can’t tell you the length of every putt that I hit but I think that I played that round over in my head so much that if I can’t remember every shot I can remember most of them,” he said.

In the years since, Crooks has only seen North in person one time.

Back when Crooks competed, a player aged out of U.S. Junior eligibility when he was 18. Now, junior players have an extra year to compete. Plus, there weren’t as many outlets for word of the tournament to spread.

Still, Crooks was very much aware what it meant to be a U.S. Junior champion even before he was one.

Crooks isn’t the only current college coach for whom U.S. Junior week means a little something extra. Cincinnati men’s coach Doug Martin won in 1984 and Davidson men’s coach Tim Straub won in 1983.

Straub is one of a distinguished group to finish runner-up (in 1982 at Crooked Stick in Carmel, Indiana) before going on to win the next year at Saucon Valley in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

“The first year – the U.S. Junior when I was 15 – it was the first real big national tournament I played in,” Straub said. “I remember thinking it was the hardest golf course I’d ever seen in my life.”

A deep run in ’82 meant Straub returned in ’83 as the favorite. He also felt he was playing like one.

For Straub, winning in ’83 meant also getting a spot in the U.S. Amateur. College coaches began to turn their heads, too. Straub went on to play college golf at Wake Forest where he was a member of the 1986 NCAA Championship team.

“Even from the previous year I knew what an accomplishment it is to play well in the U.S. Junior,” he said.

And no matter how many years go by, that’s one thing that never changes.

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