The offseason is here, with all of Arizona’s sports done for 2023-24 season and the 2024-25 campaigns still a little ways away.
Which makes this a great time to step back and see how all of the Wildcats’ programs are doing, especially with the impending move to the Big 12 Conference.
Over the next few weeks we’ll take a look at each of the UA’s men’s and women’s athletic programs to see what shape they’re in and what prospects they have for the near future. We’ll break down each team and evaluate how it is performing under its current coaching staff, looking at the state of the program before he/she arrived and comparing it to now while also looking at the upcoming debut in the Big 12 and beyond.
Next up: Giovana Maymon’s women’s golf team
How it looked before
For the last 14 seasons, Arizona women’s golf was led by coach Laura Ianello. Under Ianello, Arizona advanced to the NCAA Championships nine times and won the national championship in 2018.
Ianello, an Arizona alum and former collegiate national champion, excelled at getting the program to peak at the right time. Few program in the country matched Arizona’s consistency in the postseasons.
The Wildcats put together a successful 2023-24 season despite having a young roster. Arizona finished one shot short of advancing out of NCAA Regionals.
In early June, Ianello left Arizona for the Texas job in a bit of surprise move. In the last week, Arizona athletic director Desireé Reed-Francois hired Maymon, a Texas A&M assistant, as the new head coach.
Where things stand now
In hiring Maymon, Reed-Francois is taking a big swing on a young, up-and-coming coach who enters the job with plenty of pedigree. Maymon was a four-year standout at Baylor, where she helped the Bears to a runner-up finish at the NCAA Championships.
To put in perspective how young Maymon is, her senior year at Baylor in 2018 was the year Arizona won its last championship. Arizona ousted Baylor in playoff holes to advance to the 8-team match play tournament that the Wildcats ultimately won.
Maymon spent two years as an assistant at South Alabama before joining the Texas A&M coaching staff in 2021. She helped coach the Aggies to three straight NCAA Championship match play appearances.
Maymon was part of a Texas A&M staff that landed the No. 2 ranked golfer in the 2024 recruiting class.
Maymon arrives at Arizona months after the program unveiled the $15 million William M. “Bill” Clements Golf Center at Tucson Country Club. The facility includes new locker room spaces, coaching offices and a physio room. It also offers a dedicated covered hitting bay adjacent to an outdoor driving range, a short range area and state-of-the-art putting technology.
The facility should allow both Arizona’s men’s and women’s golf programs to continue to recruit at a high level.
Maymon’s toughest job during her first months on campus will be retaining as much of Arizona’s underclassmen talent as possible. Before Ianello left, Arizona was projected to return all-conference selection Carolina Melgrati as well as core contributors Julia Misemer, Lilas Pinthier, Charlotte Back and Nena Wongthanavimok.
It’s highly unlikely all five players would stay on under a first-year head coach. If Maymon can keep even a couple players in the program, it would be a huge success.
What life in the Big 12 should look like
Arizona enters a diminished Big 12 Conference that is losing its top program, the Texas Longhorns. Texas won five of the last seven Big 12 titles and advanced to the NCAA Championships in eight straight seasons.
After Texas, the top carry-over programs are Oklahoma State and Baylor. Oklahoma State is coming off an appearance in the NCAA Championships.
The addition of Arizona and ASU should inject some life into the Big 12. The two in-state rivals should emerge as the class of the conference, though it will take Maymon at least a season or two to get Arizona near the heights it achieved consistently under Ianello.
One big question
Can Maymon recruit at a high level?
Maymon has big shoes to fill. Replacing a national championship-winning coach like Ianello isn’t going to be easy, especially for a young coach who is in their first head coaching job.
While Maymon lacks experience of older coaches, she’ll be able to lean into her age as a way of relating to a younger crop of golfers. A native of Mexico City, Maymon is personally familiar with the process of pushing international players into college, which should further help in recruiting an increasingly international pool of golfers.
With the support of assistant coaches, the advantage of having the William M. “Bill” Clements Golf Center across town and Arizona lineage of producing professional players, Maymon shouldn’t have trouble pitching Arizona to recruits. But in this era of NIL and open player movement, it’s never been harder for coaches to acquire and retain talent. Doing so will be Maymon’s greatest challenge in her first season at Arizona.
