Golf 9/27/2023 3:00:00 PM Mario Russo

Growing the game: Abigail Dove and her journey to build a legacy

The elevator shimmied towards the ground floor of Abigail Dove's residency. With every descending floor, Dove inched closer to her first ever event as a member of the TMU Bold golf team. Gripping her bag of clubs closely to her side, the elevator doors she faced divided.

One by one, a pair of girls stepped through the mouth of the entrance, briefly joining an excited Dove on her morning trip down to the building's lobby. The elevator's rolling hush was abruptly interrupted the moment the doors closed.

The two girls approached Dove. A look of surprise and confusion rushed to their faces as they began to connect the dots between the TMU golfer and her golf bag. Seeking confirmation, one of the girls asked Dove if she was going out to golf, a question the latter emphatically replied to by saying: "yeah, I golf for the team."

The elevator began it's downward crawl. Below her black visor and the yellow hair ribbon nestled atop her head, gently rested a smile that Dove stretched from one side of her face to the other.

"Oh I golf, I just didn't realize there was a team," said the girl.

Reaffirming her belief in the program, Dove advised the girl to come to tryouts next summer, but her hope for a new teammate and friend soon began to dissipate.

"I don't think I'd be good enough for that," said the girl, who despite hearing Dove's encouragement to come out and develop, pulled away from the idea as quickly as it got started.

Silence consumed the elevator as they got closer and closer to the ground floor. The doors finally opened at the bottom of the building and the three girls walked separately to start their day.

The brisk morning air crashed onto the face of Dove as she opened the door to her building. Outside of Dove, the cool wind shivered throughout the city streets. Within Dove, warmth and optimism wrapped around her heart as before her TMU career had even officially started, her plans to grow the female side of the sport were already taking shape.

From the moment Dove placed her golf bag down in her dorm for the first time, her goal to reinvent women's golf at TMU had a call to action. The first-year entered the golf scene in late August of 2023 after making the Bold team, and the historical significance of the move did not seem to lag far behind.

Overnight, Dove became just the seventh female golfer in the program's history to tee it up for an OUA season and the first to do so in over five years. The 18-year old jokingly mentions the addition of her several male teammates is: "like gaining ten new brothers," and looks forward to fortifying a relationship with each of them in the coming weeks.

The TMU golf team poses for a team photo — *^{Abigail with some of her Bold teammates at the first event of the 2023 season.}*

Aside from dusting her drives and potting her putts around the golf course, Dove is looking to bring a more intangible presence to the clubhouse that expands well beyond the OUA fairways.

"I am super excited to be a part of the TMU Bold golf team and be able to take a leadership role within the women's side," said Dove, adding that her hope to inspire other young women to play the game of golf is more of an active task than a loose wish.

Because hoping is not what trailblazers set out to do. And Dove knows more about paving a path better than most, having been around those like-minded influencers her entire life - one of them being Sportsnet's Christine Simpson.

The 58-year old has spent the majority of her professional life growing the trend of female sports anchors landing on-air jobs with some of the city's biggest sport networks. With the sport media industry being one of heavy male dominance, the road to becoming a main personality within a major network is a daunting path that historically, has never guaranteed success.

*^{Abigail Dove with Christine Simpson ahead of a hit on Sportsnet.}*

Pursuing a career in sports media herself, Dove has become increasingly close with Simpson over the years - a relationship that blossomed from Dove's role on a live Sportsnet broadcast in the winter of 2019.

The two communicate almost regularly, however, the biggest message to stick with Dove has instilled endless possibilities into a pair of careers that are historically considered challenging to break into.

"You can achieve anything you put your mind to," Simpson explained to Dove - a nine-word aphorism that quickly became the sole inspiration behind molding the latter into a trailblazer of her own right.

And one that desires to leave the golf program at TMU in a better place than where she discovered it.

"I don't want to make a name for the program individually, I want other girls to do it with me…I want us to do it together," said Dove, who hopes to walk away from the program in three years with a lineup of young women tripping over each other to fill her shoes.

"I don't want to leave [TMU] and not have another girl be here for another five years," she added.

Dove understands the path to growing the game is by no means an easy trail, however, the main source to the problem is something she believes can be fixed over time. The lack of confidence within young women on just an athletic scale barricades a plethora of opportunities to grow golf - amongst many other sports - to a new generation of female athletes.

Dove believes sharing her confidence will help better grow the sport as a whole, and looks to instill this into others through the way she presents herself both on and off the course.

"I hope that while I'm doing this - being the only girl competing on the team - I am inspiring other girls to have the confidence to come out," said Dove. Since arriving at TMU, the rookie has never been at a loss for confidence - thriving is an element she has come to expect both on the course, as well as the concourse in her first year with the Sport Media program.

Dove believes each of the career paths she's chosen is currently undergoing some of the biggest changes in regards to the success of female athletes and anchors. More and more women are spearheading the sport industry every single day, and Dove is just another link to the growing chain of fundamental change.

"You can see the change and that's the important thing. It might be a small change happening right now but there is change happening," mentioned Dove. "That's what helps keep me motivated," she added.

Regardless of how the golf season progresses for Dove this year, her routine on the morning of tournaments will remain relatively untouched in the years to come.

No matter where she lives, her clubs will continue to rattle inside her bag as she walks out her apartment door. She'll be the only person on her floor waiting for the elevator to arrive and bring her down the building.

The doors will open. The elevator might even be empty. Silence will take another nasty bite from the air of the confined space as Dove makes her way closer to the ground. She'll walk out of the elevator and lunge through the doorway to greet another brisk fall morning.

Everything may very well feel the same to Dove as it did the year before, until she turns to discover a lineup of teammates that wait for her to come out with a line of blue and gold sweaters, visors, and hair ribbons bobbing in the dim lit September sky, walking alongside the blistering sidewalk. Together.

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