There have been times in the last month when Elena King didn’t know whether she was coming or going. After the case of “planes, trains and automobiles” she’s gone through, you can understand why.
King, a director of instruction at the CGA/CWGA-owned CommonGround Golf Course in Aurora, just returned from Iowa, where she went to a University of Iowa golf reunion at which she and other former Hawkeyes received their long-overdue varsity letters.
But that was just a minor trip — nothing compared to the halfway-around-the-world adventure King and University of Colorado women’s golfer Emily Talley (pictured together above) were involved in last month. King was an assistant coach for the U.S. women’s golf team and Talley was one of the five American female golfers at the World University Games in Shenzhen, China.
For King, the trip there went Denver to Chicago to Beijing to Shenzhen. That’s more than 8,700 miles in the air — one way.
“I left Denver, and door-to-door it was 34 hours (of travel),” King said this week. “I don’t think I knew which way was up. You just keep going until you get there. You’re just exhausted. We got there about 1 a.m. and we were going on sheer adrenaline. Everyone was up by 8 a.m. and the opening ceremonies were the next night. About the second or third day, you hit the wall.”
But King wouldn’t have traded the experience for the world.
“I looked at it like the opportunity of a lifetime,” she said of the biennial competition. “And representing Team USA was a great honor.”
In just the second year golf has been part of the World University Games, the U.S. women placed third in the team competition — behind champion Chinese Taipei and runner-up China — and Talley finished 16th individually. But in some respects, that was beside the point.
The trip was also about experiencing one of the biggest sporting events in the world — college athletes from all over the globe competing in 24 sports — and the culture of China.
“Supposedly, it’s the second-largest international sports competition in the world, second to the Olympics (and) bigger than the World Cup,” Talley said on CUbuffs.com. “… It was amazing. There were volunteers everywhere. There were 170,000 volunteers for 8,000 student-athletes. Every single venue (except for the golf courses) was built for this event. Now they’re turning all the dorms and everything into a university, so we were the first ones to use it.”
Talley said the highway was shut down the day of the opening ceremonies — and a national holiday was declared — to allow for the buses to take all the athletes and coaches from their compounds to the festivities. And Talley noted that she met one kid who had also been to the Olympics, and he said that the opening ceremonies for the two events were comparable, and that the one for the World University Games may have been even better.
“The whole time I was in awe of how neat it was to be inside of an event this large and of this magnitude,” King said. “It was way bigger than I ever imagined, and China didn’t miss a beat. It was so impressive.”
As for the golf, King was an assistant coach under Diane Thomason, who coached at the University of Iowa for 27 years. (The two are pictured together at left.) The team practiced and played — in very hot and humid conditions — at one of a dozen courses at the Mission Hills facility, and King said she was able to contribute most as an assistant coach during the several practice days.
“Our five girls were very mature golfers and young ladies, and their attitude was really good,” King said of Talley, Caroline Powers, Catherine O’Donnell, Brooke Beeler and Tessa Teachman. “They continue to look forward; even if they make a triple bogey they don’t let it bother them. They were very good at managing the emotional and mental parts of the game. It was fun to be part of.”
With so many different languages being spoken at the Games, the competitors often had to improvise when communicating with playing partners.
“Very, very little English was spoken,” Talley said. “Most of the interactions, you use more hand signals than anything. That was the really cool part.”
After the 72-hole competition, many in the U.S. golf traveling party did some sightseeing in and around Beijing, going to the Forbidden City and the Great Wall, among other places. Since King had visited China on two previous visits, she skipped the final side trip to Beijing, but for many, it was an experience they won’t soon forget.
Walking on the Great Wall “was amazing,” said Talley (pictured there at left — second from front — with her teammates). “It was one of those ‘I can’t believe I’m here’ kind of moments. It’s one of the Seven Great Wonders of the World and I was on it. … You get there and it’s bigger and better than I could have ever imagined.”
Meanwhile, King said she gained a new appreciation for the dedication demonstrated by world-class athletes, and how hard they work to reach their potential.
All in all, King said, “It was the trip of a lifetime. Very few people will get the chance to experience an event like that from the inside like we did. It was unique.”
