*This article originally appeared in the LSJ’s October/November magazine, click here to see the PDF
By Jon Styf
LocalSportsJournal.com
Spring Lake’s Zoe Dull finished her high school golf career with two birdies on the final three holes.
It wasn’t enough to win the state title she had envisioned, but it was enough for the Central Michigan commit to edge friend Chaille Payne of Forest Hills Northern for Dull’s second straight second-place finish in the Michigan High School Athletic Association Division II finals at the Meadows in Allendale.
The pair of 73s she shot showcased the transformation her game had taken since she first played at the state finals and shot in the 100s as a freshman playing Michigan State’s Forest Akers West course.
Dull quickly rose from the Lakers’ No. 4 to No. 2 golfer as a freshman, but that’s where the work began. Day after day over the past four years, she showed up at Spring Lake Country Club and both transformed her swing with Club Pro Josh Lathwell and put time in on the course.
Spring Lake’s Zoe Dull with Coach Dan Start.
In the winter, it was be time on a simulator and, as she grew older, she added in TPI flexibility training and later strength and conditioning.
“Golfing every day, it was something that I enjoyed,” Dull said. “It wasn’t like a chore or anything like that. I just knew it would be a fun opportunity and I wanted to see how it would all work out.”
The big swing adjustments came earlier in high school and, by her junior year, it became more about fine-tuning and working on the mental side of the game.
That summer, before her junior season, was when Dull started to realize she could be really good at the game and it became a college aspiration.
“I played a lot more tournaments and I qualified in a couple bigger events (in summer 2023), which was super cool and I was playing against these college people and I was pretty head-to-head with them,” Dull said.
That’s when honing the mental side of her game ramped up. Zoe’s dad, Andrew Dull, is the founder of a creative marketing company in Spring Lake and he started building course books with Zoe, allowing her to see and envision the course before she plays it, add her own notes and club selections along with noting where she wanted to place the ball on a green. It helped take the uncertainty out of the game and allowed Zoe to think through each course mentally before she played, making the actual golf match about more muscle memory than uncertainty. The concept grew and, not only did Zoe start using it for every course she played, she brought her teammates in on it to.
So, if you were to ride in the van with the Spring Lake girls golf team to a road match this season, you would hear Dull going through the course, shot by shot with her teammates, mapping out what was about to occur. Spring Lake Coach Dan Start called it a mix of a mother figure and an assistant coach with her younger teammates, who she led to the state finals again.
“That was kind of her role,” Start said. “Someone to help them. She was so well-prepared and she was trying to get the other girls to focus in on being really well-prepared.”
Start said that the difference he saw in Dull’s game from her junior to senior year was mental and about confidence. Her junior season, Dull was hitting the ball well, but was more new to being an elite performer and figuring out how to handle that.
As a senior, she brought confidence – not only on her shots but in her preparation for the course – knowing if she had one errant shot she didn’t have to fret because she could make up that stroke somewhere else on the course.
“You can have a game plan, but if you can’t execute the shots then the game plan doesn’t really matter,” Start said. “The last two years, she has really focused in and her swing has gotten so much better as where she can execute the shots and so now she has the ability to say ‘I want to be on the right side of this fairway, I want to hit this part of this green, I need to lay up in this spot.’ She can control those things.”
Dull attributes it to consistency of effort. She kept a club in her hands consistently, even as she played as a midfielder on Spring Lake’s state title girls soccer team in the spring, and she was able to grow in confidence and ability.
On the final day of Dull’s high school career, she was able to keep herself from glancing at the leaderboard, where Dexter’s Avery Manning took a four-stroke lead on Friday and finished the weekend with 11 birdies as she maintained the lead throughout.
Instead, she was focused on her own game, taking the next shot and was able to finish Day 2 strong despite her disappointment on missing out on her goal, a state title.
“I just went out there and tried my best,” Dull said. “She played great, so I was content. I was obviously a little disappointed, but I think I played the best I could those few days.”
