Champions, with their first ever trip to NCAA Regionals just around the corner.
PHOTO COURTESY OF RU ATHLETICS
The Radford University women’s golf program’s storybook season isn’t over just yet as the Highlanders captured the 2025 Big South Championship for the first time in school history on April 16.
With the historic win, Radford also punched its ticket to the NCAA Regional for the first time.
A day after recording its highest finish in the stroke play portion of the Big South Championships since 2015, Radford won the conference’s match play title with a 3-1 victory over No. 1 seed Charleston Southern to earn the league’s automatic berth to the NCAA Regionals.
The Highlanders, who were competing in the Big South Championship Match Play portion for the first time in program history since the format was added in 2021, knocked off No. 2 High Point, 3-1 in the morning semifinals. After the Panthers won match two for an early 1-0 lead in the showdown, Radford stormed back to score three-straight wins to advance to the title match.
The squad then kept that strong momentum going into the day’s later championship round. Radford won the first two points when Grace Addison and Caroline Gilreath both picked up individual victories.
Despite the quick lead, Charleston Southern fought back and made it a 2-1 match. Radford needed to win one of the remaining two matches to take the school’s first conference crown in program history.
All eyes turned to Shea Smith, who found herself down three through the first nine holes. She reduced the deficit to just one after hole 11 and then went on to tie the match on hole 16. It was all knotted up after 17 holes when Smith took the only lead she needed to in the second session of the day as she drained an eight-foot put on the par-5 18th for the victory.
The Highlanders made it to the semifinals for the first time after the group posted a strong third-place finish over the tournament’s first three days of team stroke play. Radford finished +53 as a squad, just three back of leader Charleston Southern and 22 up on the fifth-place team to easily advance to four-team match play.
After helping the Radford women’s golf program to its first conference championship in school history, Macy Johnson was named the Big South’s Scholar Athlete of the Year to go with First Team All-Conference honors, announced by the league office last Thursday morning.
Johnson had an unreal year on the course for the Highlanders this season. To go with the program’s first championship in program history, the Salem native won two events as an individual during the 2024-25 campaign (at ECU, Fall 2024 and at William & Mary, Spring 2025). She also became the program’s all-time individual tournament wins leader in school history with three career victories overall.
She was a standout in the classroom just as much as she was on the course as she recorded a perfect 4.0 grade point average as an economics major. Johnon was also inducted into Beta Gamma Sigma (an organization honoring the top 10 percent of business undergraduate students in the country) to go with being a mainstay on both Radford’s Dean’s List and the Big South’s Presidential Honor Roll.
Johnson is the first Radford student-athlete to claim the Big South’s Scholar Athlete of the Year since 2014 and is just the fourth Highlanders to win the prestigious award overall.
Radford University Athletics
