Signature: LSU men’s golf coach Chuck William Winstead

Photo by Stephanie Landry

Age: 47
Hometown: Ruston, Louisiana
Occupation: LSU men’s golf coach

You can buy the bumper sticker or T-shirt telling everyone you bleed purple and gold. You might think you do, but you’re not even close to what flows in the veins of Chuck Winstead.

The men’s golf coach oozes all things LSU and never more so than when his Tigers won the 2015 NCAA title this spring.

“You can spend more time with the guys on your team than with your own family. To know the joy they were feeling and that they’ll be able to claim that the rest of their lives is pretty emotional,” Winstead says.

And it put an exclamation point on an LSU career that started with him leaving Ruston to play golf for LSU in the late 1980s. After he graduated in 1991, Winstead tried his hand as a player but learned that his future was as a teaching pro.

He gives a lot of credit to a book called Fairway to Heaven, about the legendary golf teacher Harvey Penick, for influencing him while working for Jack Nicklaus in North Palm Beach, Florida.

“As an LSU guy, the idea of getting back to Baton Rouge and having my family raised in a college town was always very appealing,” he says.

Winstead and his wife, Jennifer, have two sons, Trey and David. Trey, a junior at University Laboratory School, is an LSU commit, his dad is proud to point out.

Winstead, an avid deer hunter, left Florida to become the pro at the English Turn golf and country club in New Orleans. And when the opportunity arose to become the pro at University Club in 2000, Winstead took it. That led to getting the LSU job in 2005.

“I thought to coach my alma mater, that would be a dream come true,” he says.

Not that he was inheriting a top-flight program. LSU was ranked closer to 100th than No. 1.

“There were a lot of things that had to change,” Winstead recalls.

You can tell he doesn’t even like to consider what winning it all—LSU’s first golf title in 60 years—meant to him.

“This whole process really hasn’t been a personal thing for me,” he says. “Because I played at LSU and because I love the program, it’s a little tough to reflect on what it means to me individually because we do all we can to build a culture that it’s not about any one person.

“There is a lot of gratification, but I’d have to say the majority of it is because of all the different people around the program that this has made happy.” lsusports.net