Woods Watch: Cheyenne Takes 1st NCAA Title

There's been no sophomore jinx for Cheyenne Woods this season at Wake Forest. Not only did she get her 1st NCAA win this past week, she's been named Golfweek/Golf World Player of the Week. She continues to lead her team in scoring average this season and has moved into the top 25 in Golfweek's women's collegiate individual rankings and the top 35 in Golfstat's ranking system.

I'm as surprised as The Squire over at Golf Babes, to tell you the truth. Sure, I knew she had been having a good fall, had been impressed by how she handled her sponsor exemption into last year's Wegmans, and had noted back in July 2008 that:

In a golfing world packed with talented teenage girls, she's no prodigy. So it's no shock that she's not getting sponsors' exemptions into LPGA events, as [Mika] Miyazato and [Kumiko] Kaneda have been getting on the JLPGA for years. But she has shown the capacity to improve at every level at which she's competed. So the fact that she's so far behind her top peers right now should be no cause for concern. People and golfers develop at different rates and Woods has indicated she's in this for the long haul.

So it's not the fact of her improvement that's surprised me--it's the rate at which she's improved that's impressed me so much. She's still quite a ways away from the top 25s that Jennifer Song and Alexis Thompson got at the Kraft Nabisco Championship last week. But give her a couple more years to improve at the college level and we'll see what kind of game she brings to the Futures Tour and LPGA Q-School in 2012!