Bogenschutz leads Grizzlies into Sun Mountain Intercollegiate

Montana will host the two-day, 54-hole Sun Mountain Intercollegiate on Monday and Tuesday at the Missoula Country Club, with play scheduled to start at 9:30 a.m. each morning. Eastern Washington, Idaho State and Portland State will complete the tournament field.

When Montana senior Kate Bogenschutz tees up her ball on Monday morning for her first shot at the Sun Mountain Intercollegiate at the Missoula Country Club, she'll be nervous, but it won't be the most pressure-filled moment she will have faced this month.

After Montana competed at the Bear Brawl in Greeley, Bogenschutz remained behind and sat for an in-person interview, part of the application process to be part of next year's incoming class at the University of Colorado School of Dental Medicine.

She's since completed an online interview with the Creighton School of Dentistry and has upcoming interviews with the Iowa College of Dentistry and the Marquette School of Dentistry, where her orthodontist father, David, did his schooling.

It makes golf, with its yardage books and green maps to guide a person along, feel like a, well, like a casual 6,000-yard stroll in a beautifully manicured fenced-in park, with a known pathway to get from first tee to final hole in 72 strokes.

This? For this there is no preparation, outside of having the Big 3 at the ready. Why dentistry? Why (name of school)? And would you tell us more about yourself? Beyond that, the questions remain secret until asked of the interviewee.

And pressure? Colorado gets upwards of 3,000 applicants for each year's new class. A few hundred of those get the type of interview Bogenschutz sat for. In the end, 80 will make the final cut. The school prides itself on having a seven percent acceptance rate.

You think a difficult chip shot that Bogenschutz has to get up and down to save par will ever faze her again, after putting her future in her hands, then handing it over to a committee to decide if she'll ever get the chance to be a dentist?

"I texted my family before my first interview, I don't think I've been as nervous for golf as I am for this right now. I was really nervous for it," she said.

At least golf has the courtesy of giving you instant feedback, whether that be eagle, double-bogey or anything in between. Dental schools can start posting their lists of those who made the cut to begin next fall on December 15. Or they can wait until whenever, just adding to the angst.

Roll-down spots may not be finalized until August, just weeks before classes begin.

"What I've learned is each school uses different questions. Some are about ethics, others more personal, some do a mix. It's hard to prepare for," she said. "It's very nerve-racking."

She didn't include us on her list of references, but what's not to like? She is the epitome of what the NCAA prides itself on, how most student-athletes will go pro in something other than their sport, how some pretty elite performers excel well off the public's radar.

Bogenschutz has a 3.76 GPA as a biology major and has done it while balancing practice and tournaments that are almost exclusively on the road and played during the week, usually on Monday and Tuesday, seriously cutting into class time.

She's also a member of Montana's Student-Athlete Advisory Committee and was accepted into Montana's Davidson Honors College prior to taking her first course as a freshman. And she's never had a cavity in her life, which should count for something in the interview process, right?

Again, what's not to like? (Looking at you, Marquette, which is her preferred landing spot, though she's not choosy.)

"You'd want a whole team of Kates in terms of work ethic and what she does on and off the golf course representing the University," said Griz golf coach Jimmy Mee. "They don't get a whole lot better."

David and Carol Bogenschutz almost got a whole team of Kates, three-fifth of the way, anyway.

They met in Milwaukee, when he was attending Marquette and she was in medical school, on her way to becoming a pediatrician. Both are from Wisconsin (David: Appleton; Carol: Kenosha), so they just remained in place, setting up in Grafton, 30 minutes north of the city.

Jack arrived, then – surprise! – triplets: Kate, Erin and Tori. "You never felt like you were alone in anything," Bogenschutz says of being one of three. "You always had those two next to you. The hardest part of being here is being away from them. You always had two built-in best friends."

And that's also part of the reason she is here. Time and distance have, importantly, loosened those ties while also strengthening them at the same time. She no longer needs Erin and Tori at her side but also has come to realize how important it is to have them as an integral part of her life.

"I gained a lot of independence coming here," she said. "I wanted to go a little bit farther just to push myself, become a little bit more independent."

All four kids grew up skiing, courtesy of David's love of the slopes and the family's annual winter trips to Colorado. Back inside, Kate and Tori flipped for gymnastics, which they did from the age of 5 through the start of high school, Kate excelling on the bars.

What there wasn't in her life was golf, outside of tagging along with her dad and Jack when the family visited Carol's parents at their Florida place, which happened to sit alongside a golf course. She'd hardly picked up a club in her life prior to becoming a freshman at Cedarburg High.

"Our parents made us all pick a sport going into high school," says Kate. "We were in a smaller middle school, so they wanted us to meet people."

Tori took her gymnastics background and became a diver. Erin, the endurance junkie who today uses Ironman triathlons as her outlet, joined the cross-country team. Kate? She didn't want to do what her sisters were doing, so she opted for golf, the sport she'd never really tried before.

Her freshman year, "I wasn't very good," she admits. As a sophomore, she was on the JV team and varsity reserve, not exactly the launching pad for a golfer who might one day shoot a 75 in her collegiate debut.

That she's here, she can thank Cedarburg teammate Elise Hoven for first going down the path, how she trained with a private swing coach and practiced outside of the high school golf season. When Hoven, two years older than Bogenschutz, signed to golf at North Dakota State, Bogenschutz had an epiphany.

If Hoven could do it, why couldn't she? "My junior year, I started working with a swing coach and practicing all year," she said. "My junior year summer, that's when I first started communicating with some coaches and getting the idea that I could golf in college."

Once she started giving it her full attention, it was her gymnastics background that helped her skip some of the steps of someone going from varsity reserve to sought-after college golfer.

"When my swing coach started working with me, he said gymnasts and hockey players pick up golf really quick because they are really strong and have that built-up athleticism," she said.

Bogenschutz kept putting up lower and lower scores and earning higher and higher finishes, which had more and more college coaches learning her name (that's "BOE-gen-shoots").

One of those was former Montana golf coach Kris Nord. "I was immediately curious," Bogenschutz said. "I'd been talking to schools in the Midwest, but I'd always had the idea that I wanted to go a little bit farther away, especially with golf giving me the opportunity. Why wouldn't I take that?"

She was open to almost anything but also drew a line in the sand that she was not going to cross. This was not just golf, this was a step toward going to graduate school, something in the medical world, so she needed to be a science major.

"Some schools I talked to said I'd have to switch my major to golf there," she says. "They didn't think I could be a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) major and be part of their team."

Which seems antithetical to the purported student-athlete experience, that to do the latter you have to sacrifice some of the former. She wasn't having it. Competitive golf had a shelf life. Her chosen career would be hers for decades.

"Those schools were off the table for me. I knew I was going to do something after college that wasn't golf," she says. "Montana offered both, plus so many resources. They said I could give my all in golf and school. That was part of my decision."

She kicked off her collegiate career as a freshman shooting an opening-round 75 in Saratoga Springs, Utah, at the Big Sky Conference 54 for IX in September 2023, then followed that with rounds of 80 and 82 as a mild case of impostor syndrome set in.

"That whole year was hard," says Bogenschutz, who played in four of the team's nine tournaments that year, finishing with an average of 80.75. "There is so much that goes into freshman year. School, playing against girls who might be 22. It can be a scary experience."

Nord coached the team through its fall schedule that year before retiring. Mee took over in January.

"You could tell she was athletic. She could hit the ball a mile," says Mee, who had been Nord's assistant coach. "She was timid on the golf course but every once in a while she'd go out and shoot a boatload of birdies. You'd think, where did this come from and why can't this happen all the time?"

Bogenschutz's story is the story of so many college golfers. She's shot a round of 75 or better every year she's been a Grizzly but her averages as a freshman, sophomore and junior were 80.47, 78.34 and 78.17.

She'd tear it up in qualifying, when playing on a Missoula course she knew well, with a teammate by her side, scores in the low 70s aplenty when the pressure was at almost zero.

Then tournament play would arrive. Pressure: Enough to feel like she was carrying two bags, one for her clubs, one for the associated pressure that comes with college-level competition.

"Tournament golf is so different. You put so much pressure on yourself," she says. It doesn't help you're golfing next to usually two other golfers from other schools, and how can't their performance – Wait, did she just open birdie, par, birdie, birdie? Really? – weigh on your own psyche and impact your play?

"You have to play with blinders. You can only worry about yourself but that can be hard. When you're playing next to two other people, that can mess with you. For me, it's getting out of my head and trusting myself more. I'm still trying to figure it out."

Last week in Bozeman, at the Yellowstone Intercollegiate, Bogenschutz opened with an 80 and was 10-over through nine holes in Round 2. She played the last nine holes of that round at even, then shot a 74 in Round 3.

"Those first two rounds are how freshman-year Kate played. Timid, anxious on the course. Then I finally freed myself up a little bit. The third round, I let it all go and trusted my process and all the practicing we've done. I'm still working on that as a senior," she says.

As a freshman, she might bomb a driver right down the middle of the fairway, then, instead of going for a reachable green, she'd lay up and have to hit another approach shot to the green. "She is a lot more aggressive," said Mee.

"I used to play so scared. My course management has gotten way better. I can attribute that to Jimmy. I used to play some silly, silly golf," she says.

"I think those last 27 holes in Bozeman were a light-bulb moment," Mee says. "Just relax and go play golf and quit thinking so much. I'm excited to see where the rest of this season can go for her. I don't think she's ever completely put the tournament together that she knows she can do."

It's not just her golf game that's evolved. The player who used to be so quiet, so timid, is now the leader on her final Montana team, the Grizzlies' lone senior. "Kate from freshman year to Kate now are two very different people," Mee said. "Now she's kind of the glue that holds the whole thing together."

And that means navigating some touchy situations within the team, like when her beloved Green Bay Packers opened the season playing the Minnesota Vikings, beloved team of freshman Ellie Sticha.

It was looking so promising for her team when Green Bay went up 22-10 midway through the third quarter. Minnesota went touchdown, touchdown, touchdown, touchdown to close out a come-from-behind 39-22 victory.

"I got a text (from Ellie) once they lost, Hey, did you see this???!!!" Bogenschutz said, but at least she wasn't her brother, who bet a Vikings-fan friend that the loser had to run as many miles as the other team's margin of victory. "Long day for him the next day.

"They'll get it together. They are just warming up," she said the day before Green Bay lost 35-14 to Atlanta on Thursday at Lambeau Field to drop to a desultory 1-2. Minnesota is now 3-0, meaning more trouble will be coming her way on the range on Monday morning from a feeling-good Sticha.

Jack graduated from Creighton with a degree in economics, found out he's not suited for a desk job and is now in flight school, a future pilot. Tori spent one year at Vermont before transferring to Wisconsin, joining Erin as proud Badgers.

Everything will come quickly now for Bogenschutz. The rest of the fall schedule, the end of the fall semester, December 15, a date that could change everything and make for the happiest of all holidays, her future known and locked into place. Or it could carry over to the new year.

She'll take a handful of final classes this spring and present her capstone project on the biological and economic effects of putting off dental care at UM's Conference of Undergraduate Research in April, two days before the Big Sky Conference Championship tees off in Arizona. The life of a Grizzly.

It's why student-athletes always get a good, hard look at places like dental school. They've already shown they can handle the demands. And then some.

"I've gotten a lot of questions about golf, so that's been nice," Bogenschutz said about her first two interviews, with Colorado and Creighton. "I've heard that being a student-athlete might give you a little bit of a boost. It shows responsibility and time-management."

The Marquette Dental School has an acceptance rate of four to six percent, depending on the year, making it one of the hardest to get into. They have yet to interview Kate Bogenschutz.

Part of the school's mission statement reads: Marquette graduates will be problem-solvers and agents for change in a complex world so, in the spirit of St. Ignatius and Father Jacques Marquette, they are ready in every way to go and set the world on fire.

Seems like she would fit right in, wouldn't you agree?

Bogenschutz leads Grizzlies into Sun Mountain Intercollegiate

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Kate Bogenschutz

Ellie Sticha

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