It might be hard to believe, but to Jeanne Sutherland, something was missing.

For the last four years, Sutherland was the head golf professional at Colorado’s Vail Golf Club, a beautiful facility tucked in at the base of the Gore Mountain Range near one of the nation’s most popular ski resorts that allows guests to play within view of some of the country’s most dramatic mountains.

Sutherland, a four-time conference Coach of the Year during a 15-year run at Texas A&M, left VGC when she was named head coach of the women’s golf program at SMU April 13.

Jeanne Sutherland comes to SMU with four conference Coach of the Year awards on her résumé (photo by Texas A&M athletics).

“I wore a lot of different hats” at Vail, Sutherland said. “I dealt with merchandising, staff management, program management, and a majority of my day spent with instruction.

“More than anything, I missed the competition, I missed the kids. I really thought that those are two things you can’t get in the golf business — the opportunity to work with talented young players and the competition. I’d sold myself short on those things.”

In Sutherland, SMU landed a coach who viewed the Hilltop as an elite destination when she was a young player.

“When I played college golf, SMU was the program to go to,” Sutherland said. “Kyle O’Brien, (current Ohio State head coach) Therese Hession … (then-SMU coach) Earl Stewart was legendary. So my first impression of SMU, when I was a junior player was, ‘would I ever be good enough to play there?’”

Sutherland did not end up at SMU, playing instead at Northern Iowa University.

“I was still learning when I was in college,” she said. “I had a lot of power, and I was a little bit of a risk-taker. I scored well or very poorly — very rarely was I in between.”

For all of her success in her decade and a half at Texas A&M — Sutherland’s teams won three Big 12 Conference titles, and in addition to her four conference Coach of the Year awards (one in the Southwest Conference, three in the Big 12) and her 1997 NGCA District Coach award, Sutherland also was named NCAA Central Region Coach of the Year in 2007 — she said she feels better prepared to take over the SMU program.

“Now I know my job a lot better,” Sutherland said. “I was green then — I hadn’t coached. I had to feel my way through. Now I know exactly what I want, and I know how to get there. At A&M, I was building a program and building myself as a coach at the same time. You never stop learning — that never stops. Kids change a little, generationally, but most of the time, they like the same things: they like to work hard, have some structure, be praised and be successful.”

Sutherland said her team at SMU will resemble its coach, in the way the players perform and in the way they carry themselves.

“I think the team will reflect my style, in that they’re going to look like they’re having fun on the course,” she said. “I want my teams to play loose. I want them to be prepared to play loose, and have some fun out there. Those are the things I do when I coach in competition, too. We’re going to be prepared, but we’re going to be loose. We’re going to build a level of trust between us, and when we do, we’re going to have fun. I would think most of my teams at A&M reflected that, and that’s what we’re going to have here.”

Immediately upon her arrival in Dallas, Sutherland set out to tackle what she calls two of the most important tasks in building a program: recruiting and fund raising.

“Recruiting and fund raising are the same — they’re about building relationships,” Sutherland said. “I like to go meet people and build relationships, and I have a talent in it.

“We’re selling our vision: we’re going to produce a championship team, successful students and successful golfers who go on to great careers in whatever they choose, but hopefully a lot of them go on to careers in golf. We have yet to set our team vision — we’ll do that as a group — but my job is to help them be successful in whatever they do.”

For someone who has enjoyed so much success in her coaching career, Sutherland said her primary focus when interacting with her players does not revolve around the actual mechanics of striking a golf ball as much as many might think.

“I have a huge amount of knowledge about a golf swing, and of course we’ll work on that,” she said. “But I view myself as being a little different from the average golf coach, as far as being a psychology coach. My job is to prepare them to compete as best as I can can, and then step back and watch them. I cheer, I support, and then we work really hard (in practice) on what I saw during the tournament.

“They’ll be fit — their short games and putting strokes will be very well practiced, and they’ll have confidence in their ball striking. My job is to get them ready for the course, to provide strategic plans and support them. If they buy in, do what I want and buckle down, they’ll be prepared, I’ll feel confident and they’ll play loose. That transition is not a baby step — they’ll make that leap, or they’ll drag their feet and be left behind.”

Many coaches, when taking over a team, will issue predictions about how long it will take to collect a certain number of victories or championships. Sutherland refrains from trying to peer into that crystal ball, in part because she doesn’t want to limit expectations.

“We have a three-year plan in place right now, but it doesn’t come with that kind of end result,” she said. “Those things come if you’re doing right things.

“Besides, you can sell yourself short. You can say, “we’re going to win Conference USA, but if you do things the right way, you just might be ready to win a national championship, too.”