Carrie Russell is a hard woman to find.

A quick Google search will turn up a few hits, an African American Golfer’s Digest article being the most fruitful, a solid biography of a woman whose name might not immediately ring a bell but whose impact has been felt by many who followed in her trailblazing footsteps as an LPGA Professional.

A book listing on Amazon will also pop up, featuring a comment left by Carrie’s niece Vernetta Williams calling Russell a “courageous pioneer” in the review section underneath the title “Heroines of African American Golf: The Past, the Present, and the Future.”

There is a downloadable, five-page PDF on LPGA.com that gives a brief history of how the LPGA Teaching and Club Professional division came about, listing Carrie as the first Northeast LPGA Section president and the first Black woman to earn her LPGA Class A Certification.

But otherwise, there is very little else to read about Carrie Russell. She passed away in 2012, and having lived most of her 83 years well before the modern age of technology, before a person’s entire life history was just a click away on the internet, her story and what she did for women’s golf isn’t as widely known as it should be.

However, Carrie’s memory lives on through the women she cracked doors for and the family she left behind to carry on her legacy, one that has now been memorialized with the introduction of the LPGA Professionals Carrie Russell Champion for Change Award.

Carrie’s daughter, Robin Gibbs, remembers her mother as “approachable, compassionate and adventurous” and can regale you with stories about her mother’s career in education, as well as Carrie’s escapades when the family moved to Japan after Robin’s father, Alfred Russell, was stationed there with the United States Air Force.

“I do remember as a little girl her being very adventurous,” Robin recalled. “When we lived in Japan, she didn't speak any Japanese. My father was on the base, and he'd be working, and she’d just go out on the trains. She couldn't read any Japanese. We would go, and we'd ride along on these trains, and somehow, she would figure out where we were going.

“She climbed Mount Fuji early as a young woman because she was adventurous to want to try to do something like that. She just wanted to do things that most people wouldn't expect you to do. That was kind of always how she was.”

Carrie was an educator, graduating with a BS in English in 1949 from what was then known as Delaware State College, ultimately teaching both English and Physical Education when Robin was growing up. It wasn’t her first choice of occupation – Carrie was interested in nursing and the military – but it was a profession that made it easier to find work when Alfred’s job moved them from place to place and was one of few jobs available to Black women with a college education at that time. Throughout her academic career, Carrie also coached all kinds of sports, including girls' track and field, boys' touch football and both boys' and girls' basketball. She even taught swimming at various points.

“She loved to teach swimming,” said Robin. “She loved to teach the ones who were most afraid of water. She would always take all the beginners and teach them.

“My mother has always been very athletic. She played softball, she could throw a football better than most guys and golf just kind of came naturally to her.”

Carrie Russell Coaching Basketball

Alfred ended up getting Carrie into golf in the early 1960s, and the couple took advantage of the opportunities they had to play courses affiliated with the Air Force, facilities that wouldn’t turn them away for being African American. Carrie and Alfred were hungry to improve their golf games and often leaned on people who would give them equipment and golf lessons until they both got pretty good at it.

If they weren’t allowed to play a certain course, Carrie and Alfred would go to the local sports fields in Dover, Delaware, to hit shag balls for practice. The pair enjoyed playing together and loved having golf as a shared hobby. But for Carrie, the game would wind up meaning so much more to her legacy than she could have ever imagined when she first picked up a club.

The Teaching and Club Professionals Division of the LPGA was founded in 1959, and after taking an education position at Delaware State University in 1973 and starting the college’s first-ever golf program as well as coaching women’s basketball, Carrie became a Class A member of the LPGA Professionals in 1974, one of the first Black women to do so.

Carrie Russell at Events

Two years later, when then LPGA Commissioner Ray Volpe chose to put some legs behind the Teaching and Club Professional Division, ultimately deciding the entity should run and lead itself, Carrie was appointed to be the very first president of the Northeast Section of LPGA Professionals, another glass-breaking moment for the African American golf community.

Carrie held that position until 1978, serving in other leadership roles in the Northeast Section over the years, and then set her sights on becoming a Master Professional, the highest certification an LPGA instructor can achieve. She had been teaching golf at various courses for a number of years, and for a woman who was more than used to being the first person to do this or that, this goal seemed like the natural next step in her career as an LPGA Professional.

“Because nobody else had done it,” said Robin when asked why her mother decided to pursue her Master certification. “I would say it was one of her proudest achievements. She talked about it all the time, and she was super busy with it, with phone calls and traveling. It was natural for her because she loved talking to people. She loved sharing the game of golf with people. And in this way, she would be able to use her teaching skills and have a validation of how good she really was at it.”

Carrie shattered another ceiling in 1994 when she became the first African American to earn her Master Professional certification via the LPGA Teaching and Club Professionals Division, 20 years after she first became a Class A Member. She continued giving lessons and working with golfers of all ages for as long as she was able to, collaborating with her fellow LPGA Pro Phyllis Meekins to host a variety of clinics in the 1980s and serving as an instructor for the LPGA Urban Golf Program in the 1990s.

Because of her contribution to the success of the organization and her many historic, first-of-their-kind achievements, the LPGA Professionals decided to honor Carrie by naming the Champion for Change award after her, with the first recipient set to be selected later this year. It takes plenty of courage and resilience to do what Carrie did at a time when African Americans were not always welcome in the golf space, and this honor will be given to someone with Carrie’s unstoppable and passionate attitude who has made an impact in their golf community.

Carrie Russell

Considering how little the public knows about Carrie, Robin was overjoyed to learn that her mother’s contributions to the LPGA would be recognized by such an award and is confident that Carrie would have felt the same if she was alive to witness this moment. From the time she first picked up a club to her passing, golf was her biggest passion in life, one that Carrie wanted everyone to know about and participate in as she knew firsthand just how the game could change your life.

“She would be delighted because it pushed the game of golf even further for more people to recognize the fun and to keep it going, and more people would be attracted to it, especially people who generally would not consider golf as something that they could play,” said Robin. “She brought the game of golf to a lot of people who had never even heard of it or watched it on TV. Everyone knew her to be the golf lady. Everywhere she went, it was always about the game. She would be tremendously honored to be recognized for something that she loved so much.”

It’s interesting how a person’s legacy lingers long after they’re gone, how once the shards of those shattered glass ceilings are swept away and those once-locked doors swing open, the change that one person affected is something that will forever impact those who come after.

The ripple effects of the work that Carrie did all those years ago to help the LPGA Professionals thrive and bring golf to the masses are still felt today by people who might not even know her name or what she accomplished as an African American in the latter half of last century.

But Carrie was never in it for the recognition.

All she ever cared to do was introduce a game to a group of people who would have never otherwise played it, to empower people by giving them the tools to succeed on the golf course, to show others the joy that golf could bring, to give them a gift of a sport they could enjoy for life.

Because for Carrie, that’s exactly what it was all about – growing the game. And boy, did she do just that.

LPGA Master Professional Carrie Russell’s Legacy Lives On Through Champion for Change Award

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