Shane Lawler '21 Recruiting Profile

My name is Shane Lawler. I am admittedly a late bloomer when it comes to golf as I did not play golf competitively until the 8th grade. However, despite my late start, due to my work ethic, athletic ability and intensity, my golf has improved drastically in a short amount of time and continues to improve every day.  

While I was introduced to golf as a 4 year old, I was focused primarily on baseball in my early years. From the age of 8, I played year round baseball on a variety of competitive and successful travel baseball teams. While I am a strong baseball hitter, I am a particularly good pitcher and have strong success through the years including a few no-hitters. I have particularly enjoyed the mental aspect of pitching and the challenge of outthinking the opposing batters. I have often been complimented on the baseball field for my work ethic, focus, intensity, and ability to perform in pressure situations. I believe these same traits have contributed to my recent dramatic success in the game of golf.   I continue to pitch on my high school's varsity baseball team.

During the summer before my 8th grade year, I decided that in addition to playing baseball that I wanted to try out for my high school golf team. To do that, I asked my parents to join a golf club and I dedicated myself to improving my golf game. My hard work during the two summers prior to high school paid off as I made the junior varsity as a freshmen as the last person on the team shooting an 18-hole score of 92 during the tryout.  

As a freshman, I was not satisfied with making the junior varsity and continued to work on every aspect of my golf game. As a sophomore, I made the varsity team and played in every league match and played in the league post season tournament.  I continued to work on my golf game and as junior, I was named to the All Inter-Academic Conference first team and led my school to the Pennsylvania PISAA State championship.  My improvement in my golf game has been significant. In only 3 years, I have improved my handicap from 15 to a 1.0. I attribute my success and improvement in my golf game to the same traits which has made me successful as a baseball pitcher - a strong work ethic, focus, intensity, and an ability to perform in pressure situations. In addition, my golf swing coach John Dunigan has been instrumental in my success and improvement.

As I continue to improve, I plan to play in many competitive golf tournaments this summer on the Hurricane and AJGA junior golf tours and hope to prove that I can compete with the best junior golfers in the country. I am pleased to say that I placed 3rd most recently in my first tournament of the summer season at the Hurricane Mid Atlantic Junior Open at the Chesapeake Bay Golf Club in Maryland. I look forward to competing and continuing to improve this summer. 

As a player on your team, I will be the student athlete who will constantly work on my craft and will always be looking for ways to improve my game. I am the player and teammate, who carries himself with a quiet and humble frame of mind, but often leads others by example and will inspire my teams to get better through my work ethic. I would like to attend a university that will fulfill my dreams of playing golf at the collegiate level while also maximizing my opportunities academically in computer science and business.