Josh Brewer sees in Savannah De Bock the quality all good players have: An unfailing confidence in her own game.
“She thinks she’s holing every shot she can get to the hole,” said Brewer, the new women’s golf coach at Eastern Michigan. “If it’s a hybrid or a putt, she really thinks she should make it.”
De Bock, from Belgium, spent the spring semester at Georgia, playing for Brewer. She transferred to Eastern Michigan for her sophomore season to follow a coach she felt she connected with and now, she could help lay a foundation for a revitalization of the Eagles’ women’s golf program. Here’s a player who could be a contender on the Annika Award Watch List and in the conversation for other postseason honors – as Brewer says, someone who can “cause some headaches for the Power 4 schools.”
De Bock’s fall season began last month at big venues, like Chambers Bay in University Place, Washington, which hosted the 2015 U.S. Open and the 2022 U.S. Women’s Amateur. De Bock tied for eighth there at the season-opening Leadership and Golf Invitational. She was six shots out of first and her week included a quadruple bogey on the 18th hole because of “a bad shot that led to another bad shot that led to another bad shot,” she said.
“I learned from it,” De Bock said, “We can see that this weekend was much better.”
On a high-altitude Tom Fazio layout for the Golfweek Red Sky Classic in Wolcott, Colorado, a week later, De Bock didn’t make worse than bogey (and had only four of those) on her way to winning her first individual title in two years. De Bock’s 15-under 54-hole total at Red Sky Golf Club is one off the tournament record, and a mind-blowing amount under par for a big golf course set at 8,000 feet with fast, undulating greens.
“Some of the pins were really hard, but I had done a very good practice round with the coaches so I knew where to aim on the greens and what zones to avoid,” De Bock said. “We had a very strong strategy on the par 5s to know when to attack and when not to.”
A second-round 65 at Red Sky is De Bock’s personal best in competition, and she only realized that after counting up all the birdies at the end of the day. She’d posted 66 in tournament play plenty of times, most notably when she won the European Ladies Amateur Championship in 2022.
Just talking about that championship reminded De Bock of the drought she’d been in ever since that title. It was something she’d talked about…
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