Samantha Saffold has been swinging a club ever since she was 11 years old. Tired of being left behind by her father and sister whenever they went out to the golf courses, she picked up the clubs so she could spend more time with her family.

Saffold has come a long way since then, but even as just a freshman playing her first year of intercollegiate golf, her father and her coach both agree that she already displays the capacity to play at the highest levels of golf.

“I think she is a terrific, terrific golfer,” golf coach David Sutherland said. He said she is a good conference player and “an absolute joy to work with.”

“She loves pressure. The more people she has around her, the better she plays,” her father, Hardy Saffold said.

The youngest member of the women’s golf team, she has already led the team in scoring for this golf season twice. At the Lady Aztec Fall Classic in October, Saffold and sophomore Brooke Green led the team with a score of 153 at the end of two rounds to tie at 23rd place, while at the UNLV Spring Rebel Invitational in March, Saffold took the lead again by shooting a 222 for the three-round tournament to finish in 35th place. This earned her a Big Sky Conference Golfer of the Week Award, which she shared alongside Eastern Washington University golfer Marli Mikulecky.

The Sacramento native learned all of her tricks from her dad. Eschewing other forms of tutoring, she relied only on the advice of her father and the numerous hours of practice she has spent on the greens of the Ancil Hoffman Golf Club and the Haggin Oaks Golf Complex.

All that practice would pay off by the time she enrolled at Del Campo High School in Fair Oaks, Calif. Saffold played at the varsity level all four years of her high school career, winning the team MVP and league MVP awards her senior year and competing all the way up to state champioships.

This attracted attention from schools as far away as Old Dominion University in Virginia, that offered her a full scholarship, and the University of Louisiana at Monroe. She turned down all those offers and opted for the one offered by then-head coach Adam Pohll because she wanted to stay close to home and her family, Hardy Saffold said.

Saffold was surprised to learn of former Sac State coach Adam Pohll’s departure for the University of Nevada before she had a chance to meet him over the summer, but was glad to have found a role model and the greatest source of her inspiration in David Sutherland because “he’s a happy guy” that has a talent of perking up everyone’s spirits. As she said that following the end of the second round of the Western Regional Preview on Monday, Sutherland promptly announced he was taking the team out for dinner.

Known as “Sammy” by all her friends and family, Saffold enjoys browsing YouTube videos and looking at Facebook profiles during her leisure time. She is an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy novels with a particular fascination of vampires. She lists Anne Rice as her favorite author and is such a fan of the movie “Queen of the Damned” that she said she can recite all the lines of the entire movie.

Like any other college student, the sociology major’s daily routine consists of slapping the snooze button five times before she gets out of bed, feeding the cat, screaming at the 9 a.m. College Town exit traffic congestion, attending class and topping off the day with a solid 3 to 5 hours of golf practice. A connoisseur of lasagna, she enjoys going out to Jack’s Urban Eats in Loehmann’s Plaza after practice with her teammates.

She said she has no definitive plans for the future with her major yet, but for the summer she plans on volunteering with First Tee, an organization under the World Golf Foundation that aims to teach junior golfers how to play golf and promote character development through the sport.

Justin Tejada can be reached at [email protected]