Golf
Favorite athlete: Rory McIlroy
Favorite team: Anything Philly
Favorite memory competing in sports: Going to States with the Hatters Golf Team junior year and winning the Spring-Ford Invitational sophomore year
Most embarrassing/funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports: When we had a one-stroke win over our conference rivals and our coach skipped around the parking lot screaming
Music on iPod: Alternative and Pop
Future plans: Attend Gettysburg College to play golf and major in either Business or English
Words to live by: “Live in the moment.”
One goal before turning 30: Be happy and love what I do
One thing people don’t know about me:I love One Direction
By GORDON GLANTZ
If you can imagine being a skier growing up on a ski slope or a figure skater with a rink in the backyard, you know what it’s like to be in the shoes of Hatboro-Horsham senior Hannah Fireman.
The incoming freshman at Gettsyburg College and Univest Featured Female Athlete of the Week happens to be a golfer who was raised at Talamore Country Club and inherited her love for the game from her dad, Michael.
“I live at Talamore, so I grew up learning this course,” she said. “And my dad is the best player I know, and he has always been there. My dad introduced me to the basics. He is the best short-game player I’ve seen. He really works at it.”
While Fireman also played tennis and basketball up through middle school, those games were not in her blood the way golf had always been.
However, when she got to high school, there was no girls’ golf team. She played on the boys’ team as a freshman, and while it was not an ideal scenario, she made the best of it.
“I was proud of how I played as a freshman,” she said. “I qualified for districts, so it was really cool for me to do that. It was tough at times, but I usually played well.”
But the best was yet to come. Fireman had bigger plans. She wanted the girls at H-H to have their own team and compete against other girls’ teams.
“She wanted to have a team,” said Glenn Kaiser, who had been the interim coach of the boys’ team. “I said to all the girls that were interested, ‘you go find one friend and bring them back and we have a team.’ And that’s what they did. She really spearheaded this as the student-athlete in the building to make it happen. It was a no-brainer for the athletic department to add a girls sport.
“I came back the next year and said, ‘Let’s give this a shot.’ We had no schedule – it was terrible. We had to play boys’ jayvee teams, but then we started playing the academies, (Gwynedd Mercy Academy and Mount St. Joe’s) and we were getting pounded. Then we had an opportunity to join the PAC-10. We talked about it as a team, the coaching staff and parents and Mr. (Lou) James and the administration to switch out of the Suburban One and do this because they had an eight-team league. We got in and we’ve won two (league championships) in a row.”
It was only fitting that Fireman more or less clinched that first league title with strong showings against Downingtown East and Great Valley.
“Of course, everyone remembers my leap of joy and fist pumping all the way up the hill and down the hill, and then I almost ran a girl over with the cart,” said Kaiser. “It was nice to repeat again this year, and having a team go to states two years in a row – I don’t know if you can ever do that. As a coach, that is outstanding. I’ve got to thank Hannah and wish her the best of luck in college.
“She launched it. I was just along for the ride. It was just unbelievable.”
Taking Initiative
Fireman was more than just a founding member of the H-H girls’ golf team, which played its home matches at her home course at Talamore.
She helped launch at Jewish Awareness Club at H-H, a school without a large number of Jewish students, and she found a way to reach out to the golf coach at Gettysburg when she wasn’t getting the same interest as she was from its rivals, like Dickinson and Franklin and Marshall.
“I had to push to get the coach to notice me,” she said, adding that Gettysburg was the best team in the Centennial Conference and a Division III potentate. “I actually called a player on the team who I knew, and had her pass the message on.”
Jumping to Another Level
Fireman said it was somewhere toward the end of her sophomore year when she started thinking about playing golf at the next level and she confirmed that with her play as a junior, turning in efforts like the 39 she shot against Perkiomen Valley when the team’s other standout, Cassidy Gavaghan, was sick.
“No Cassidy, so we had to lean on Hannah,” recalled Kaiser. “I said to Hannah, ‘You’ve got to go low,’ and she goes ‘How low?’ I said, ‘Low, as low as you can go.’ So she was already like – oh no, here we go, and she came in with like a 39.”
Those types of heroics were great boosts for her confidence but she really needed to prove herself at another level -- against other elite female teen golfers -- on the summer circuit, in order to attract mutual interest from colleges.
She played in the IJGT (International Junior Golf Tournament) and Philadelphia Junior Elite Series and also its “regular” junior tournament.
“I played a lot this past summer,” said Fireman, who said a vital benefit was that she was playing courses that were college distance.
“That’s when she jumped to a whole another level,” said Kasier. “She really took off.”
While encouraged that her play attracted interest from Gettysburg’s rivals, she is relieved to have a found a place at her first choice.
“At first, I wasn’t sure if I wanted a big school or a small school,” said Fireman, who is an honors student at H-H, serves on student council and is part of a freshman mentoring program called the Link Crew. “It is small, but it didn’t feel small to me. It’s close to home. Everything just fell into place.”
Being close to home means a lot to Fireman, because she is close to her family, which includes her mother, Robin, and her younger siblings – Mollie, 15, who runs cross-country and Nathan, 13, who is “starting to express an interest” in golf.
“I want to thank my whole immediate family,” she said. “It wasn’t just my dad. My mom came to tournaments, too. My parents were a part of my college search and were very hands on.”
Fireman added that she “couldn’t have asked for a better coach than coach Kaiser” and that she appreciated the “whole team” that featured players of varied skill levels and backgrounds.
“I had a lot of fun playing with them,” said the three-time captain. “It was an interesting group of people.
“We had an intense season this past season. We really had to fight hard.”
Team Player
Kaiser felt it would not have been possible without Fireman’s leadership in an individual sport that does not lends itself to a lot of rah-rah moments.
“She’s kind of a leader by example,” he explained. “She has respect for the game and the rules of golf etiquette. She carried herself well. Plus, her good play made everyone around her want to emulate that.”
Fireman had a hard time putting her leadership role into words, but felt good about her impact.
“I just tried to keep the team’s best interest in mind,” said Fireman, adding that she honed her skills of knowing when to give a teammate a pep talk and when to leave them be during her three years on the job as captain. “I didn’t feel like I needed to take chances at being a leader. For the most part, it’s really an individual sport. Mostly, it meant looking out for the team. It’s such a mental game. Way more than it is physical.
“It’s a crazy game. There is no way to judge how you are as a player. There are so many rules, and you have to understand and respect your teammates. It’s also a game of trust. People can fake a score. Sadly, people do that when they are struggling.”
While Fireman respects the game too much to fake a score, she has first-hand experience with the game’s frustrations.
“The whole ‘mind’ part of it is tough,” she said. “I didn’t play as well as I would have liked to this past summer.”
While she may not play as rigorous of a slate this summer, she needs to pick up where she left off this past season.
“I’m going to start in the spring, and play a full tournament schedule,” she said. “I feel like I’m going to play better.”
And when she just feels like competing against herself, she can just step outside the door of her home.
“I like to try and play 18 every (holes) every weekend,” she said. “It’s nice that I can do that.”
