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Daniel announces retirement after six seasons leading Clay City's girls golf team
When Clay City High School created the school’s first-ever girls golf team in the spring of 2019, the athletic department approached Elissa Daniel to gauge her interest in becoming head coach.
Daniel, who had nearly a decade’s worth of experience leading the school’s cross country and track and field teams, was hesitant at first. But after speaking to the inaugural group of Lady Eels – Stella Harrison, Saydee Hauer, Olivia Owens, Makenna Blankenship, Kelly Culver and Demi Wolfe – the longtime computer science educator agreed to do the job.
“Thinking back, I was kind of hesitant to do it because I had already coached track for eight years and I knew it would be a lot, but this coaching job has really, truly been stress free,” Daniel recalled.
And it’s a decision Daniel was glad she made.
Daniel, after leading the program for the last six years, is retiring from her post as Clay City’s head coach and will be turning things over to Ryan Swearingen, who has spent the entirety of the fall alongside the team to work with the Eels and get to know them better on a personal level.
She said the program is in a healthy place with several underclassmen that have shown improvements throughout the season. It’s reminiscent of the positive momentum Clay City took from Year 1 into Year 2, which resulted in the program’s first-ever Southwestern Indiana Athletic Conference championship, a memento the Daniel is extremely proud of.
“This is probably the best thing I’ve done in the 30 years that I’ve taught. It’s also the most enjoyable and the most rewarding because with those first girls, none of them knew how to play golf. None of them knew how to hold a club, but in our second year, we won conference. I think that might have impressed some people,” said Daniel. “They were athletic and competitive, and they started [the standard at Clay City]. It’s been really hard to see the girls go every year, which says [a lot about the types of people they are]. We’ve had to kind of rebuild and then rebuild again but I feel like it all turned out really good.”
The reason for Daniel’s desire to step away and head into retirement? She’ll also be retiring from teaching at the end of the 2024-25 school year. And with a culinary background – Daniel’s brother was a chef, and her parents used to run a restaurant – as well as multiple degrees in event planning, Daniel has a new path she’d like to travel down.
“I have other things that I want to do. I have degrees in other fields and my plan was always to try to get a food truck. And with one of my degrees being in event planning, that’s something I’m interested in pursuing,” Daniel said. “I think that’s going to be the next thing for me.”
And while she won’t be around the team she helped create moving forward, Daniel will continue to root for the Eels from afar. She’s also looked into the idea of bringing them back once per year for an alumni tournament to ensure they’ll be able to stay in touch with one another.
“I told Stella Harrison, who has been out to watch her sister Ashley a lot this season and was on our first team, that we needed to get an alumni tournament going. I’m really interested in doing that if we’re able to get everybody together,” said Daniel. “I’ve stayed in touch with a lot of them who come back and watch and others on Facebook, and I’ll do that with [this year’s team as well].”