Four Big Green Earn All-Ivy League Honors in Women’s Golf

HANOVER, N.H. — The Ivy League announced its all-conference honors in women's golf today, and four from Dartmouth earned their spots, including senior Samantha Yao on the first team. Freshman Sophie Thai, sophomore Claire Xu and junior Katherine Sung all made the second team, with Sung also earning a spot on the Academic All-Ivy League Team.

This is the first year the Big Green had more than two players earn all-conference honors and just the fourth time they've had multiple honorees.

Yao, a co-captain from Berwyn, Pennsylvania, tied for fourth at the Ivy League Championship this past week to put a stamp on her stellar career for the Big Green and become the sixth Dartmouth women's golfer to earn a place on the All-Ivy League First Team. She was third on the squad in stroke average (75.90) and finished in the top 10 in three of her final four tournaments. Previously Yao has been named a WGCA All-American Scholar twice and was an Academic All-Ivy League selection in 2022 while earning the Dartmouth Athletics department's Class of 1948 Scholar-Athlete Award.

For Sung, this is her second time earning All-Ivy honors having made the first team as a sophomore last spring. This year, she led the team in stroke average (74.27), beating her own program record she set a year ago by a full stroke. Sung finished in the top 10 in four of the seven tournaments in which she played, including tying for 10th at the Ivy League Championship and tying for second two other times, and all but one of her 18.5 rounds contributed to the team score. As a member of the Academic All-Ivy League, she maintains a 3.83 GPA as an economics major and will be a WGCA All-American Scholar as she was last year.

Matching Sung at the Ivy League Championship was Xu with a 232 (+16) to tie for 10th and earn her place on the second team. She ended the year with three top-10 finishes in her last four tournaments while ranking fifth on the team in stroke average (76.72). In late March, Xu became the first Big Green women's golfer ever to shoot 68, which tied the program record of 3-under par in a round. Like Yao and Sung, Xu was a WGCA All-American Scholar in 2022 as well.

The youngest member of the team to earn a spot on the All-Ivy Second Team is the rookie Thai, who finished ninth at the Ivy League Championship and produced the second-best stroke average in program history (74.58), trailing only Sung. She also broke the program record for birdies in a season with 61, just edging past Sung's 60 recorded a year ago. All but two of her 22.5 rounds counted toward the team score throughout the season, and she had six rounds of par or better to set another program record. Twice she shot a 3-under 69 — in the same tournament — as she set another team record by shooting 6-under over three rounds in a tournament.

The league also announced its major awards in the sport with Princeton earning two of the three honors — Player of the Year Victoria Liu (a unanimous selection) and Rookie of the Year Catherine Rao. Penn's Mark Anderson was named the Coach of the Year after leading the Quakers to the Ivy League title a year after finishing sixth.

Dartmouth finished third overall at the Ivy League Championship, 10 strokes behind the champion, Penn. The team won three tournaments this year for the first time in program history, and with just one graduating player in Yao, the future is bright for the Big Green.

Notes: The other women to earn All-Ivy League First Team for Dartmouth are Lauren Epstein '00 (three times — 1997, '98, 2000), Samantha Sommers '99 (1997), Catharine Roddy '19 (2017), Kaitlyn Lees '22 (2019) and Sung (2022) … Yao joins Epstein as the only seniors to make the first team.

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