Faces In The Crowd: Jeff Mitchell
June 15, 2007 | Women's Golf
June 15, 2007
By Wes Skipwith, Texas Tech Athletic Media Relations
As a player, coach, reality show contestant and now teacher, former Texas Tech golfer Jeff Mitchell has approached the game of golf in many different ways and is now passing his knowledge on to the next generation.
Mitchell teed off for the Red Raiders from 1974-1976 and helped lead them to a 15th-place finish at the 1976 NCAA Championships. Mitchell was the Lubbock city champ in 1975 and won two West Texas Championships in 1975 and 1976. He was named to two All-Southwest Conference teams and one All-American list.
Once Mitchell's eligibility was up at Tech, he went on to the PGA qualifying school where he finished sixth in a field of 375 to become a PGA tour member at the age of 21. In 1978, he won the Texas State Open after defeating Ben Crenshaw in a sudden death playoff. In 1980, Mitchell had the biggest win of his career at the Phoenix Open. He won by four strokes to claim a $54,000 paycheck. Later that year he finished tied for first after the first round at the Masters. During his nine-year career on the Tour, Mitchell finished in the top 10 13 times and made 111 tournament cuts. An elbow injury in 1983 forced Mitchell to end his PGA career early. Mitchell said the fact his career was cut short became a blessing in disguise.
"One of the positive things that happened out of that is I ended up staying home and spending a tremendous amount of time with my kids," Mitchell said. "I might not have had I stayed on tour for another 10 or 15 years. I don't know if I would have had the relationship I have with my wife and kids."
After his touring days were over he went to work giving golf lessons at several different golf courses around Texas and Florida. He said during this time he realized he liked working with younger golfers so he decided to go back to Tech and finish his degree in physical education in order to become a certified teacher.
"I got into teaching and I really enjoyed it. I was teaching a lot of juniors and I really was enjoying working with kids. My mother-in-law said, `Well you should look into going back to school and getting your teaching degree and get a job at one of the high schools there in Lubbock.' I thought boy that sounds great."
Right about the same time he got his degree, the Tech women's golf coach, Jay McClure, retired and the position was opened up. He applied for the job and was named the head coach in 1990. He spent eight years as the women's head coach and then took over both the men's and women's programs in 1998. During his time at the helm, Mitchell's teams made it to the NCAA regionals four times and to the NCAA championships twice. He was named Southwest Conference Coach of the Year twice (1993, '96). In 2000 he was inducted into the Texas Tech Hall of Honor.
"I feel very privileged to be inducted into the Hall of Honor and be among what I think is the history of the athletics in the school," Mitchell said. "It's a real honor to be thought of in that regard and to feel like people thought that I made a real difference or impact at Texas Tech."
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He left Tech that same year to head up the men's golf team at Stanford. Mitchell said the decision to go to Stanford was because of Tech's inability to build a golf course for the program.
"I fought real hard for a lot of years trying to get a golf course built there," Mitchell said. "Unfortunately I ended up leaving because I couldn't get a course built. I kind of found it ironic that a year after I left, they ended up getting it built with money that was donated from a guy (Jerry Rawls) that lives in Sunnyvale, which is just three or four miles from the Stanford campus. But I don't have any regrets, I did what I felt like I had to do at the time."
Mitchell retired from coaching in 2004. In 2006, Mitchell competed in a reality show on the Golf Channel called "Big Break VI: Trump National." He competed at the Trump National Golf Club in Los Angeles with 18 other men and women from around the country for exemptions into the LPGA Tour and the Champions Tour. Mitchell made it to the final match play before losing to Denny Helper in an extra hole playoff. Mitchell did win the most points in the "Chrysler Immunity Challenges" for which he was awarded a Chrysler Aspen.
"That was a really fun experience," Mitchell said about his time on Big Break. "It was amazingly pressure packed. I was really surprised at just how intense it was. It was filmed over a two week span with each day being its own episode. Donald Trump was there every day. He came out a watched a lot of the competition. He was really a lot of fun to talk with, which I was surprised. He was very much the gentleman, not what you see on TV."
Mitchell is now an instructor at West Ridge Golf Course in Frisco. He works with the Hank Haney group and his clients are mostly high school and college golfers. Mitchell said he enjoys his job as an instructor more than coaching because he can focus more on teaching without dealing with the NCAA bureaucracy.
"I am in a situation now where teaching is more enjoyable because I don't have to deal with all the NCAA rules and all the paper work that you have to go through," Mitchell said. "I ended up spending 50 percent of my time doing paper work and I didn't really feel like I was getting the kind of experience I was looking for as a teacher. Teaching is really probably where I'm going to stay for a long period of time. It gives me the freedom to set my schedule the way I want which is something that not many people get to do."
Mitchell lives in Frisco with his wife Christy. They have been married for 29 years and have two children. Jeffrey, 25, is a Tech graduate who now works as a mechanical engineer in Clear Lake, Texas. Lesley, 24, also graduated from Tech with an international business degree and currently resides in Washington D.C. where she is pursuing a job with the state department.