In her first four seasons as head coach of women’s golf, Shelby DeVore won four consecutive Coach of the Year awards in the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference (SCAC). DeVore, class of ‘18, has led the Tigers to four conference titles and four NCAA appearances — including the program’s first-ever at-large bid to the NCAA III National Championships during her first season, 2021-22. Under her tenure, she’s developed 17 All-SCAC golfers, four SCAC Golfers of the Year and three All-Americans. Now DeVore is leading her team down a new fairway in the Southern Athletic Association (SAA).
Titles and individual honors show the outcome of DeVore’s coaching, but that’s only part of the picture. To understand DeVore, she describes her coaching style and philosophy as “involved.” Under her tenure students have achieved academic success, with 28 golfers making the SCAC Honor Roll and seven earning Academic All-American. But DeVore doesn’t stop there. She wants to know her players personally to understand their ambitions beyond Trinity.
“I always joke with them that I want to be able to know what they’re thinking before they think it,” DeVore said. “I’m very hands-on, and I want to be as open with them as I can. I want to be somebody they can turn to when they need help. We coaches always say, ‘Yeah, we’re coaching our sports, but we’re also molding adults.’”
DeVore graduated from Trinity in 2018 after four years on the women’s golf team herself. While she always knew she wanted to work in sports, she originally went the marketing and public relations route after college and worked for a private golf organization.
“It was always in the back of my mind that coaching was something I would be good at,” DeVore said. “I love teaching. I love golf. I love influencing the younger generation. So when my coach retired, I thought, ‘This could be my chance.’”
When Carla Spenkoch, DeVore’s coach and predecessor, retired after leading Trinity’s women’s golf program for 23 years, she reached out. Spenkoch encouraged her former three-time All-SCAC golfer to apply for the now-open position.
“I asked her, ‘Do you think they’ll depend on me?’ She said, ‘Absolutely.’ And they do, obviously, because I’m still here,” DeVore said. “She set me up for success. She was still here in San Antonio for my first year, and she’s still somebody I call all the time.”
Spenkoch influenced much of DeVore’s own coaching, both as her coach and later as a mentor once DeVore took the helm.
“She was always really in tune with her players, she knew what was going on with us. She had kind of an open-door policy,” DeVore said. “That was something that I knew I wanted … She gave me her perspective, and I learned a lot from her.”
When DeVore took over, there was one thing she knew she wanted to build: team culture.
“I wouldn’t say team culture was a big part of how things were at Trinity,” DeVore said. “Because it’s an individual sport, it can get very lonely. I wanted to have a culture where we support each other, because I never want one of them to feel like they’re alone. I want them to know that they’re going to come in with a family.”
DeVore said building this culture has taken hard work. Now in her fifth year, she said that it has probably taken four years to get the culture where she wants it.
“It’s weird because they’re competing against each other, but that’s not the mindset,” DeVore said. “We like to win, but, at the end of the day, we’re going to have a good time doing it. I believe when you enjoy it and have a lot of people there supporting you, good scores will come, because all of a sudden you want to do better, not just for you, but for your team. That’s the culture. I’ve really put my heart into it, and I think this year’s culture has been the best yet.”
DeVore hopes the culture will continue to grow as upperclassmen guide underclassmen, passing it on to future first-years. She will continue to be there to cultivate it along the way.
“Now that I’ve done coaching, I can’t think of doing anything else,” DeVore said. “Trinity is my alma mater. This is where I grew up. I loved it as a student, and I love it even more as a coach. It’s a university that supports athletics so much.”
Next up for women’s golf are the SAA Championships on April 24-26 in Dickson, TN — where coach DeVore looks for her fifth straight conference title – and her first since Trinity’s move to the SAA.
