Athletes from around the world travel to East Lansing to be a part of the Michigan State women’s golf team. All but one of the nine athletes on its current roster are not from Michigan. Four are international students, while the other five grew up in different parts of the United States.
While leaving a familiar world behind to join a team full of strangers can be intimidating, the 2022-23 squad is a tight-knit group. This is in part because of the leadership displayed by the team’s upperclassmen, skills they credit to the golfers that came before them.
Senior Nina Rissi has taken over one of those leadership positions. Rissi was born in Brazil, but moved to Spain at the age of five. Her first language is Portuguese, and she speaks Spanish, English, Catalan and French, and has some knowledge of German.
Rissi had older teammates that were also international students when she first came to MSU to help her, and so she understands how to help her younger peers from all over the world.
“It definitely helps because then you're with people that also feel homesick, so I think that even brings us closer together that we're all far away from home,” Rissi said. “Even our Americans are still obviously from other states, so they're so far from home.”
Rissi also understands that the four years go by much quicker than the younger players think, especially because her experience was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and elbow surgery her sophomore year to fix a nerve.
“I really liked the opportunity of kind of being a bit of a mentor, in a sense, because I obviously had a very different experience of what they're having, but I like showing them the value of cherishing every moment,” Rissi said. “I think just like having the right attitude and enjoying every little moment and appreciating just how fast it goes by that's something that as a senior they'll listen to you say even more than maybe like an older alum.”
Because golf is such an international sport, most athletes are no stranger to competing against golfers from different places, but college golf presents a new team experience. At MSU, this means a team full of different cultures and languages.
Brooke Biermann, a sophomore from Wildwood, Missouri, has played against competitors from all over the world before competing collegiately, but said living so close with her teammates has been a completely different experience.
“I think we can all bond over the fact that we're all teammates, and that we all have one goal in mind, so that really brings us closer together and we all feed off each other's energy,” Biermann said.
Although many of the athletes had an easy enough time adjusting to living somewhere unfamiliar with new people. No two situations are the same. That’s especially true for freshman Paula Balanzategui who made the move from San Sebastian, Spain.
“Paula for example, her coming here, that was our first time in the U.S. ever, so her being on the team, like we kind of all came together to try to make her feel welcome,” junior Leila Raines said. “We're all golfers but at the end of the day, we want to make sure everybody feels at home and just kind of taking them under our wing that definitely helped us bonding wise as well.”
Balanzategui said everything about East Lansing was different from her hometown, particularly the language.
“I could not follow a conversation like I remember the first week or even like the first month I would be so tired every day,” Balanzategui said. “At the end of the day, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I don't think I can do this for more days’. I was so tired of listening to people speaking English.”
She credits having three teammates that spoke Spanish to getting her through the initial struggles, adding that the others made a big effort to learn the language for her. This gesture isn’t a new one for the team, or it’s head coach for that matter.
There are currently three golfers that speak Spanish, Rissi, Balanzategui and junior Valentina Rossi, who is from Rosario, Argentina. There were four before Valery Plata, from Floridablanca, Colombia, left after the 2022 Fall semester to join the LPGA Tour. Because nearly half of her roster spoke the language, head coach Stacy Slobodnik-Stoll decided to enroll in a Spanish class through MSU’s lifelong education program.
Although she admits it’s a difficult language to learn, it’s clear she is putting in the effort for her team in order to learn their cultures.
Music, like golf, is international. It brings people together. Slobodnik-Stoll, a country music fan, has gotten into Latin music thanks to the team playing it in the van on the way to tournaments, the two most popular artists being Tini and Bad Bunny.
Plata thinks it’s also a valuable experience for the other athletes to be exposed to other languages through music and everyday conversations.
“You get to learn about different cultures and different people,” Plata said. “I think it's something super valuable for people our age. I think, sometimes when you're from here, you don't get to experience that a lot unless you kind of put yourself out there.”
Although having people come together from all over the world to play golf together sounds easy enough, it takes a group of good, open-minded people to make a team. Because the MSU women’s golf team has that, team bonding has come easily.
“I think we're all just very open people in general,” sophomore Katie Lu said. “We're always willing to bond over our differences and try new things, try new foods, like the music that Coach had mentioned. We're always blasting Spanish music in the van.”
Although Spanish music has become a staple in the team van, the team members from the U.S. enjoy sharing the music they grew up with as well. FloRida’s “Low” in particular has been very popular, becoming an unofficial team song along with Lil Uzi Vert’s “Just Wanna Rock.”
Balanzategui said she learned the beginning of the song “Low” and the lyric “apple bottom jeans” before running into a slight learning curve. She learned the pronunciation of the word “apple” in a Michigan accent. She came home one day to her roommate, who is from California to tell her she had learned the pronunciation of the word, and was then informed she sounds “like a girl from Michigan.”
Being exposed to multiple different dialects of a second language can be difficult at first, especially because Balanzategui learned the British dialect of English before coming to the U.S. Although there’s some linguistic differences between British and American English, everyone can still understand what she is saying and vice versa.
While golf is international, it’s also an individual sport, sometimes making it difficult to promote a team atmosphere. This has not been the case at MSU.
“What I heard from other Spanish girls is that you're in a team, but you are also competing against each other,” Balanzategui said.”A lot of people say you need to be careful because they are also your competitors, but I haven't felt that at all here.”
Biermann shares the same sentiment, adding that going through the same experiences help them bond as a team.
“You hear all these stories from girls in teams where it's really a toxic environment a lot of times and that's why there's so many girls that leave their schools and transfer and and just have a pretty honestly like a miserable four years ,” Biermann said. “Without a good team and without your friends on the team, it's a grind. Like it's waking up in the morning, going to workouts, running to class, maybe getting a little bit of lunch and then practicing and doing it all over again.”
The coaching staff also works hard to promote a team environment, including keeping things interesting with the occasional random bet. Assistant coach Zach Rosendale told the team this past spring that if one of the players wins the tournament they were attending that week, or if the team wins, he would shave his head.
While the team didn’t come out on top, it rallied around Raines who tied for first, therefore winning the bet. However, Rosendale, not wanting to shave his head, backed out, but the team still found a way to make sure he stuck to his word.
“We made him get lightning bolts shaved into his heads on both sides,” Raines said. “We had spring break like a week later, so all these important donors (were there) and he was just there with lightning bolts on his head, so that was kind of funny.”
The importance of team chemistry can often be overlooked, but the MSU women’s golf team is a prime example of what a team can accomplish when its members come together to welcome each other and give unconditional support both on and off the golf course.
