Sarah Trew tees off at Alvamar earlier this month. Trew, an assistant coach for Kansas University's women's golf team, competes in long-drive competitions. She hit a 325-yard drive during a recent contest.

KU women's golf coach Erin O'Neil, left, and assistant Sarah Trew chat between shots during a recent round at Alvamar.

Boys don’t cry.

Sure they don’t.

Erin O’Neil, women’s golf coach at Kansas University, knew better at a young age. She saw all sorts of reactions from boys her age when she would rifle her tee shot past them and post a better score. One boy went beyond tears.

“I was about 10 years old when a boy I was playing against hyperventilated,” O’Neil remembered. “He got that upset that he got beat by a girl. I just walked away, (thinking) ‘sorry to burst your bubble.'”

She wasn’t sorry, of course. A born competitor, she loved it.

Yet, there came a time years later that O’Neil stopped loving the competition. After golfing at the University of Georgia, O’Neil competed professionally for three years. As a Futures Tour golfer, she stayed in private residences at all the tour stops.

“Fifteen weeks straight on the road,” she said. “I woke up, didn’t know what town I was in, didn’t know whose house it was and just said to myself, ‘this isn’t fun.’ I burned out on it. I totally stayed away from golf for a year.”

She waited tables. And the golf bug that had been in her for as long as she remembered returned. She tapped some contacts and got into coaching. KU hired her away from her assistant position at Auburn University.

She still makes boys unwise enough to compete against her feel like crying the way she belts her drives past them and consistently makes solid contact with her irons.

During a recent round with her assistant, Sarah Trew, O’Neil rolled a short putt by the cup and commented, “That’s why I’m coaching instead of playing.”

O’Neil hits the ball well enough to be on the tour but isn’t as long off the tee as Trew, known to friends as “Trudy.” Trew, who played her college golf at Georgia and then Arkansas, blasted a 325-yard drive during a recent long-drive competition in Topeka.

O’Neil and Trew both expressed confidence the athletic department’s recent push to improve facilities for women’s sports (improvements to the soccer field, softball facility, a new boathouse on the way) would improve recruiting.

The KU women and men golfers will share an in-the-works golf training facility that will include six heated hitting bays, video equipment, indoor putting and chipping greens and a TV lounge. Without that, KU golfers always have been at the mercy of the weather.

“It’s the final piece of the puzzle that we need,” said O’Neil, who estimated half the Big 12 schools already have such accommodations. “The golf facilities, between the two courses at Alvamar and Lawrence Country Club, are already great to show recruits.”

O’Neil said that when she and her two brothers were young, their father decided to move the family to the Tampa, Fla., area “to give us a better chance at getting golf scholarships.” All three children succeeded in doing so.

“We moved right across the street from a PGA professional, and once we became friends with him he would work with us a little,” O’Neil said. “My dad was at the golf course every day working with us.”

Thanks to that, O’Neil very well could be the No. 1 scramble-format draft pick in Lawrence if every golfer in town were in the pool. Her distance and the advantage of hitting from the forward tees makes her, as well as Trew, extremely dangerous in a scramble.

Trew is hoping to take home the $14,000 first prize in the national long driving competition in October.

“It’s like the WWF of golf,” she said. “… I was more known for hitting it far. I never quite got the straight part of it down.”

The attention she would attract by winning the competition wouldn’t hurt KU’s recruiting. Everybody who plays golf wants to find the secret to hitting the ball longer.