At Campbell, men’s assistant Ashley Sloup and veteran head coach John Crooks team up as one of college golf’s most interesting duos

For Campbell’s men’s golf team, Ashley Sloup lands somewhere between assistant coach and big sister.

“I’ve been able to build a relationship with each of the players and get to know them and what’s going on,” said Sloup, 25, who is in her second season coaching the Camels men’s team alongside veteran John Crooks, now in his 32nd season.

Campbell’s is a coaching setup not often seen in college golf, and Sloup credits Crooks for that. When previous men’s assistant Matt Moot took a job as the assistant coach at North Carolina State in February 2021, Crooks brought in Sloup as Moot’s replacement.

Crooks notes that Sloup is normally the only female in the room when coaches get together at men’s college golf tournaments.

“That took a lot of faith and a lot of trust,” Sloup said.

Sloup had known Crooks during her days playing college golf for Winthrop, which competes against Campbell in the Big South Conference. One day, Sloup reminded Crooks that they’d actually met a few years earlier. Both were waiting to pick up their U.S. Open tickets at will-call at the 2014 tournament at Pinehurst and Sloup had introduced herself to the coach – she was an incoming freshman and wanted Crooks to know they’d be seeing each other on the college circuit. Crooks was impressed by the interaction.

“I thought, most people would not have addressed that,” he said.

Before taking the men’s assistant gig at Campbell, Sloup spent a season as the women’s assistant at Furman. Her first foray into coaching came at Northwood University, an NCAA Division II school in Midland, Michigan, where she worked with both the men’s and women’s teams.

Sloup is in a different realm with Campbell’s men, but there are similarities that she’s able to draw between coaching experiences. At Furman, Sloup was able to coach Natalie Srinivasan, the 2020 WGCA Player of the Year and ANNIKA Award winner. At Campbell, Pontus Nyholm, who has since turned professional, was ranked as high as No. 46 in the World Amateur Golf Ranking.

Sloup saw how differently men and women attack a golf course and learned the nuances of each side of the game.

“The guys thankfully have been so respectful, so welcoming, so inviting,” Sloup said. “I really kind of felt like I was this missing puzzle piece that they didn’t know they were missing.”

Crooks, who heads both golf programs at Campbell, ranks second among all active Division I women’s coaches in tournament victories with 90, which leaves him behind only Duke head coach Dan Brooks. Crooks is a self-described laid-back leader, and much of that likely comes from sheer time spent in this game. Sloup brings plenty of energy to the table.

“I’ve known about her and her personality and she’s a lot of the things that I’m not,” Crooks said. “I’m talking about her outlook. She brings and energy to the room.”

He remembers one of the first trips Sloup went on as his assistant. As soon as the van stopped, she was out the door trying to unload players’ golf bags.

The cup is always full in Sloup’s world, Crooks says.

“Every one of (the players), when you ask them would you like to have somebody walk with you, nobody has ever turned Ashley down,” Crooks said of his men’s team. “They’ve turned me down.”

Establishing an effective coaching dynamic with Crooks was easy, Sloup said. She appreciates the wisdom and experience as well as the deep southern delivery that make Crooks one of the memorable figures in college golf.

Asked for some of the most notable “Crooksisms” players are likely to hear in the team van, Sloup prefaced her response with a note about that accent.

“He’s so southern, so you have to picture in a very southern accent,” she said before quoting her boss: “’We have a saying on the golf team – un-lucky.’ And then he’ll say, if someone does something really good, he’ll say, “Oh my.”

Any player who tries to ignore the sage advice that Crooks has to give is likely to hear something along the lines of, “Well what do I know? I’ve only been doing this 33 years.”

Sloup has taken to calling Crooks by the nickname Yoda.

“She calls me yoda not for my knowledge, and that’s important,” Crooks notes. “Yoda is the oldest living creature she’s aware of.”

In turn, Crooks’ Star Wars-inspired nickname for Sloup is Padawan, a term used in the movies for an intern in training. Both terms are fitting in their own way.

“The best thing about him,” Sloup said of the learning curve under Crooks, “is not only is he preparing me to be a head coach someday, a top assistant at another big top program, but he’s preparing me and teaching me how to grow as a young woman and as a person.”