Rhinelander pioneers girls golf in the Northwoods

Rhinelander High School is officially opening the 2025 fall sports season with the newly founded girls golf team. This is the first girls-only golf team in the area, with the hopes of expanding that to other schools around Northern Wisconsin. The fight is led by the Northwoods Girls Golf Group (NWGG).
The organization has contributed over $31,000 in the past 20 years to girls playing golf, including college scholarships.
Historically, if girls were interested in playing golf, their only option was to play on the boys team during the spring sports season. Now, RHS has allowed its female athletes to play their own season in the fall.
Rhinelander Activities Director Brian Paulson said things have been in the works for four years, but a student perception survey helped give insight and eventually ramped up the process of offering the sport.
“I have never had the amount of interest in girls golf as I did this last spring, and I held a girls golf meeting at the end of the year. I had 14 kids come to that,” he said.

Paulson said nine girls had signed up as of Aug. 8.
Rhinelander opened its inaugural season on Aug. 11 and offers a great new opportunity for girls in the area to get involved in golf – a sport that’s now officially part of their athletic options. Around the state, there are 191 girls golf programs, with 115 battling in D1 and 76 in D2.
The Hodags will compete as one of the D1 clubs in their first season. The team will not be a part of a conference but will compete in a 10-team regional at Brown County Golf Course against mostly Green Bay-area schools. Rhinelander is the only Great Northern Conference school to have a sanctioned girls golf team. The team hopes to be signed up for about a dozen (12) meets this season as an independent.
Northwoods Golf Club in Rhinelander will be the team’s home course, and Paulson said some of the players who work there had spoken with Head Golf Pro Keith Staron about the excitement of having their own team.
Rhinelander Boys Golf Head Coach Adam Schmidt was also hired to lead the girls program in the fall. He has been the head coach since 2013 and brings the experience needed to steer the ship of the team’s new beginning.
A middle school golf program, which was started a few years ago, will also help grow the girls golf program as it gets athletes into the game before they transition to high school.
“We’ve also started a middle school program two years ago, and if we wanted to ever get a girls program going, we felt like we needed to get a middle school program going,” said Paulson.
Paulson also wanted to extend a huge thank you to the NWGG for the assistance in getting the program off the ground.
“The sky is the limit for where this can go,” Paulson exclaimed.
The NWGG started in 2005 with a group of women golfers hosting a tournament in Eagle River, Wisconsin. By August 2010, the Northwoods Girls Golf Inc. was formed as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, with a mission of promoting interest in girls’ golf at the youth, middle school, high school and college levels in northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Giving girls access to equipment, mentorship, and opportunities that might otherwise have been out of reach is now becoming a reality.
For further information on how to support girls’ golf programs, please contact Marsha Lewis at 906-287-1323.