Ann Finke’s golf career has been a series of firsts—the first girl from Scottsbluff High School in Nebraska to receive an athletic scholarship; the first female member of the Nebraska and Colorado Sections of the PGA; and the first female from Colorado Section to receive a National PGA Award, the 2010 National Junior Golf Leader.
Most important, however, she’s first in the hearts of her students. Having spent more than 30 years as the director of instruction at the Country Club of Colorado in Colorado Springs, Ann has given more than 38,000 lessons, approximately 40 percent of those to juniors. Her philosophy towards the thousands of junior golfers who learn on “Finke Hill” is as much about coaching life as it is about teaching golf, she says.
Her most notable students include Tom Glissmeyer, who qualified for the U.S. Open and the U.S. Amateur as a 16-year-old in 2003, and Lanny Whiteside, the 1997 Colorado Women’s Open winner and 1998 U.S. Women’s Open qualifier.
Only the ninth female nationally to become a quarter-century PGA member, Ann served as president of Pikes Peak Junior Golf from 1991 through 2002, and she has been a driving force in The First Tee of Pikes Peak, the Colorado Section’s Golf In Schools Program and the PGA’s Professional Golf Management School at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs. In 2015 the PGA Colorado Section named a PGA REACH scholarship in her honor.
2011 Golf Person of the Year
The PGA Teaching professional at the Country Club of Colorado earned the 2010 National Junior Golf Leader Award presented by the PGA of America, becoming the first female and the thirteenth overall Colorado Section member to win a national PGA award.
