Dyar chooses JSU

By EASportsToday.com
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Updated: November 8, 2015

White Plains’ Calhoun County champion will sign to play college golf at Jacksonville State on Thursday

LAYNE DYAR

By Al Muskewitz
East Alabama Sports Today

When Layne Dyar would practice out at Silver Lakes she’d regularly see the Jacksonville State players on the course and think how neat it would be to someday play college golf.

With a commitment to improving her game and a bunch of good scores on her resume, that someday has arrived. Thursday morning the White Plains senior will sign a letter of intent to play college golf at Jacksonville State.

“When I saw it could actually be a possibility I got so excited,” she said. “I think it’s going to be a really unique experience because not everybody gets to play at the next level in their sport, and to do it at home is even more special.”

Dyar, the reigning Calhoun County girls medalist, thought she might be a little late to the recruiting game, where top juniors start getting followed in their pre-teens. She sent her golf resume to five schools – JSU, UAB, Troy, Birmingham Southern and Montevallo – and hoped for the best.

In the meantime, as her game continued to rise, several other schools began to show interest. She had all the tools – low scores on the golf course, high scores on the SAT and a perfect GPA (with a handful of accredited college courses in the bank) – and after much due diligence JSU “kept emerging as the place I knew I needed to be.”

Once she decided college golf was in her future, Dyar and White Plains golf coach Marcus Harrell worked to make her game competitive on the next level. As those improvements took hold, she was the Calhoun County girls medalist, was substate medalist with a 68 and helped the Wildcats win the first state championship in their school’s history.

“We have made a lot of changes to her swing since really the beginning of her junior year,” said Harrell, who will continue working with her while she goes to JSU. “When she approached me and said she wanted to play college golf I told her if she wanted to commit to that we had to make some changes.

“Really about midseason, around the County, it really started clicking. … The improvement in fixing her mechanics didn’t stop there. We continued with that. Right now she’s on top of her game, by miles where she was.”

Dyar is particularly pleased to be able sign early, so she could play her senior season unencumbered by the weight of a major life decision. Her focus now is leading the Wildcats to another state championship and winning every event they play.

“It takes a lot of stress of her,” Harrell said. “You could see this summer it was almost like a weight on her shoulders wondering what she was going to do. Now, she can go out and play golf and enjoy her senior year.

“If anybody deserves good things in life, it’s somebody who works as hard as she does; it’s Layne.”

Dyar isn’t the only player on the White Plains champion girls golf team eyeing a spot on the next level. Teammate Morgan Prickett recently committed to play at Montevallo, where she’ll join 2015 White Plains senior Reagan Thompson and former Alexandria player Jessica Howard. Prickett will sign later this season.