CARLSBAD, Calif. — Northwestern captured its first NCAA women’s golf championship Wednesday when Dianna Lee holed a 5-foot par putt on the 18th hole to beat Andrea Revuelta for a 3-2 victory over top-seeded Stanford to end a final hour of high tension.
Stanford advanced through stroke play with a record score to win by 21 shots and was poised to win its third NCAA title in four years and become the first team to win back-to-back since the move to match play in 2017.
Instead, the Wildcats were screaming with delight at La Costa when Lee — who had twice before missed putts that would have won it — delivered the biggest putt of her life.
“More than doing what people didn’t think you could is this group believing what it thought it could do,” said Emily Fletcher, in her 17th year as the Wildcats coach.
Cardinal junior Megha Ganne won 5 and 4 in the lead match, while Northwestern freshman Hsin Tai Lin scored a 3-and-2 victory.
Lauryn Nguyen put the Wildcats on the verge of the title with a 7-foot birdie putt for a 1-up victory over Paula Martin Sampedro.That left the Wildcats needing one more point from either Dianna Lee, who was 3 up with five holes to play, or freshman Elise Lee, who had taken her first lead over Stanford’s Kelly Xu on the 15th hole.
The Cardinal didn’t go down without a mighty fight.
Xu, who missed a 4-foot putt to fall behind for the first time all match, answered with a 15-foot birdie on the par-3 16th and a wedge to 10 feet for birdie on the 17th to regain control. They halved the 18th hole, giving Xu a 1-up victory and tying the team score at 2.
It came down to the final match that Dianna Lee once had firmly in her grasp. Revuelta bogeyed the 11th and 12th holes to fall 3 down with five to play. But she won the 14th with a par and holed a 15-foot birdie putt on the 15th to get within one.
Lee was in a back bunker on the 16th, blasted out to 7 feet and missed her par putt. Revuelta, however, pulled her 4-foot par putt to stay 1 down.
On the next hole, Lee had a 12-foot birdie putt to win the match and pulled it, running it nearly 5 feet by. Miss that and the match would have been all square. She holed it to stay 1 up going to the 18th.
The par-5 closing hole amounted to a wedge contest with a stream guarding the green. Both players had about 18 feet for birdie. Lee’s uphill putt spun hard off the left lip and rolled 5 feet by. Revuelta left her downhill putt short, setting up Lee for the win.
This time she made it — and the celebration was on for the Wildcats, who had reached the final once before in 2017 at Rich Harvest Farms in Sugar Grove but lost to Arizona State.
It’s the 12th national team championship in school history — 11 of them coming this century in women’s sports: eight in lacrosse, two in field hockey and now one in golf. The 1941 fencing team won Northwestern’s only men’s national title.
The women’s lacrosse team can make it two national championships in one week when it plays in its 16th Final Four this weekend in Foxborough, Mass. The third-seeded Wildcats face No. 2 seed Boston College in a semifinal Friday (4:30 p.m., ESPNU), with the championship match scheduled for Sunday (11 a.m., ESPN).
