Gerina Piller: College Golf (Part 2)

The collegiate golf experience helped shaped Gerina Piller and her game. Watch and listen as she shares her journey (Part 2).


Transcript

My goal for college was to go to a school that I was going to get a lot of playing time. And that doesn't necessarily mean that I was going to a school that was really, really good or anything like that. I was more concerned with-- I didn't want to go to a school that as I came in as a freshman, I was like the number one person on that team, because that wasn't going to make me improve any. But I didn't want to not play or not be able to qualify. And so--

This is a good lesson for our girl golfers to-- because hardly anyone knows, the reason I want to have a girls on my company is because hardly anyone knows anything about any of them. Right? It's hard for girls to get good lessons and--

Well, the thing is--

--hear the stories.

The good thing about the college, college golf, is you don't just play people in your conference. Or you don't just play-- if you're in the SEC, you don't just play SEC like football, basketball, and, you know, just get to play all the good teams. When you play for college golf, you'll go to different tournaments, and there could be top-ranked schools, there could be bottom-ranked--

Could be New York, New York. Oregon could be there.

Right. And so you get a good idea of playing and measuring up to the better teams and the not so good teams, and you kind of get a really good idea of how you stand, because you are paired up against a variety of nationally-ranked teams.

Yeah. And I'm-- it sounds like that you weren't in any kind of rush to be awesome. Or were you?

Well-- [LAUGHS]

You wanted to be.

I wanted to be.

Yeah.

But you know, I knew that-- my mom's always instilled in me that, you know, education is very important.

It's still quite a ways from where I'm putting you in my mind at college to where you are now.

Yeah, I mean--

There's a gap. There's a big gap here, and I'm not sure how we're going to fill it. We're just going to keep going. But--

(LAUGHS)

When did you-- so you were in college. And when did Martin jump in the picture and all that?

He didn't jump in the picture till after--

Later?

--college.

After college.

You know, going into college is kind of, you kind of start all over as far as small fish, big pond. And, you know, I was-- my ability has gotten better, but obviously, the courses are harder. They do play it longer. The competition is tougher. And so I kind of started over, you know. I was-- I think my average my freshman year was about 81, 82. Played--

So you weren't on-- you weren't setting anyone on fire when you first got to school.

Oh, no. No, no, no. Yeah, I didn't win a tournament until my senior year. But over those four years, by my senior year, I improved 10 strokes. My average was 72 my senior year, won four tournaments, including conference. And so it was--

So you were just incremental?

Yes, yes. It was definitely a trajectory that was going high pretty fast.