Owls set for their first NCAC Championship

4/29/2026 10:45:00 AM

GAMBIER, Ohio – After compiling a highly successful spring slate that included two second-place finishes and three straight tournament victories, the Kenyon College women's golf team is poised to make some noise in the program's first-ever North Coast Athletic Conference (NCAC) Championship this weekend, teeing it up in the three-day, three-round event from Squaw Creek in Vienna, Ohio.

The Owls will join a field of seven squads for a chance to earn the conference crown and an automatic bid in the NCAA Division III Women's Golf Championship in California in late May.

In the conference, Kenyon enters the tournament ranked third in the NCAC's pre-championship coaches poll, tallying 32 votes. Denison University was ranked first (49) and received all seven first-place votes, followed by DePauw University, which amassed 42 points to finish ahead of the Owls. Wittenberg University (29), host John Carroll University (23), The College of Wooster (14) and Ohio Wesleyan University (7) rounded out the poll results.

The Owls strung together an extremely impressive spring slate, not finishing below second place in all five tournaments. A highlight for the team came at the Port City Classic, where the program logged its first-ever tournament win amongst a 16-team field. That set in motion a string of two straight victories for Kenyon, earning wins at the Steven Tyler Invitational and the Eva Shorb Weiskopf Invitational, an event in which first-year Sasha Belova was crowned medalist. That marked her second individual victory of the season, after she finished atop the leaderboard at the Kuhn Memorial Invitational in September.

Belova leads Kenyon statistically, recording a team-low scoring average of 77.12 in 17 rounds played. She also holds the team's lowest round, a one-under par 69 and has logged five top-fives and six top-10s to go along with her two wins. Not far behind is classmate Rafa Plasa, who has been trading team-leading finishes with Belova all spring, averaging 77.78 in nine rounds. She has logged five top-fives and five top-10s on the season.

Fellow first-years Jane Fanning and Camryn Nelson are third and fourth, respectively, in scoring, with Fanning carding an average score of 82.47 and Nelson 83.65 in 17 rounds each. Both have eclipsed top-five finishes twice, with Fanning logging five top-10 finishes, one more than Nelson. Macy Printy, also a first-year, will likely round out the Owls five, averaging 95.13 strokes per round and earning one top-10 finish.

The first round of the 2026 NCAC Championship will get underway on Friday, May 1 and each of the Championship's three rounds are scheduled to begin at 8 a.m.

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