Minnesota Golfer - Directory 2015 - 36

Kalen Anderson Harris
has taken her championship
pedigree to South Carolina.
By Mike Fermoyle
A
s a player and as a coach, championships have
followed Kalen Anderson Harris.
She played in fi ve state tournaments while
on the Edina High School golf team during the
1990s; the Hornets won four titles in that span.
From there, she went to Duke and was on an NCAA championship
team. In 2005, she returned to Duke as an assistant coach, and
the Blue Devils won two more NCAA team championships during
her two years there.
Now Harris is the head coach at the University of South Carolina,
where she is hoping to add to her collection of NCAA titles-
and there is a distinct possibility that she will. Her team has been
ranked either No. 1 or No. 2 by Golfweek since the beginning of the
2014-15 season in September.
It was no surprise that Harris had an early interest in golf. Her
father, Pete Anderson, was a tournament player, and her cousins,
Tim and Alissa Herron, were both distinguishing themselves as junior
golfers as she was taking up the game. " It really helped me to
have them to look up to as I was starting to play, " Harris says. " As
successful as Tim was, Alissa probably had more of an infl uence
on me, because she was playing in the same tournaments that I
was going to be playing in. She spent time with me on the course,
helped me with my game and more than anything else, she gave
me a really high standard that I could aspire to. "
Harris fi rst played in the state high school
tournament in 1993 as an eighth-grader. She
tied for 32nd place, and her scores counted
both days for the Hornets, who won the Class
AA championship (under the old two-class
format) by fi ve strokes over Alexandria.
After that, she fi nished fourth, second,
fourth and third as an individual.
In 1995, Hilary Homeyer was added to the Hornets' lineup, and
the 1-2 combination of Kalen Anderson and Hilary Homeyer (in
either order) was the best that any Minnesota girls high school
team has ever had. Their scoring averages were virtually identical
for the three seasons they played together. In 1997, when they were
both seniors, one of them took fi rst place in every tournament that
Edina played in-including the state tournament, which Homeyer
won. The Hornets won the AA team championship that year by
44 strokes.
Homeyer, who began her athletic life as a swimmer and won
lots of fi rst-place medals before she tired of " staring at black lines
at the bottom of the pool, " didn't play her fi rst 18-hole round of
golf until shortly before she started ninth grade. She shot 124. By
then, she and Harris were friends and softball teammates (Harris
pitched; Homeyer played fi rst base), and she wanted to be able to
compete with Kalen on the golf course.
It didn't take her long. Within two years of posting that inaugural
124, she was averaging in the mid-70s and was one of the top
fi ve players in the Metro Girls High School Rankings, along with
Harris.
Just as Alissa Herron had given Anderson a high standard to
aspire to, Harris set the bar high for Homeyer. And that, Homeyer
said after winning the '97 state championship, was a big part of the
reason she became such a good player so quickly.
After graduating from Edina as covaledictorians
(both got straight As in
high school), the two teammates went in
opposite directions. Harris headed east
to Duke and Homeyer (who later won
the U.S. Women's Open as Hilary Lunke)
went west to Stanford.
In 1999, as a sophomore, Harris
34
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Minnesota Golfer - Directory 2015

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