Notre Dame senior golfer reflects on school, sports, faith, and the future

Juggling the demands of a schedule that includes a full-time commitment to both academics and athletics is a challenge that all student-athletes at Notre Dame face.  For senior David Lowe, a member of the men’s varsity golf team, the challenge has been worth it.

In addition to the value of competing at a high level in a sport that he loves, Lowe cherishes his experience on the golf team for the relationships and opportunities it has provided.  “Golf has been a huge part of my experience here,” Lowe said.  “The team is like my family, and the coaches are great.”

Jim Kubinski, the head coach of the team, is in his eleventh year at Notre Dame, while assistant Scott Gump is in his third year.  Gump played on tour professionally for over 20 years and brings that invaluable experience to the table when mentoring the younger players.

More broadly speaking, Lowe has “loved being part of the Athletic Department as a whole.”  As someone who is involved in the Student-Athlete Advisory Council and serves as the group’s Community Service Liaison, Lowe has enjoyed being a part of the close-knit community of student-athletes at Notre Dame while participating in service projects and other initiatives with his fellow athletes.  “It’s been great being able to share those experiences with other kids,” Lowe said.

Like many college athletes, Lowe’s journey to playing golf at Notre Dame started when he was young.  His family, rooted in Scottsdale, Arizona, would often spend the summers (beginning when Lowe was 6 or 7 years old) several hours north in Flagstaff, Arizona.  “I would spend each summer in little kid’s camps playing golf,” Lowe said of Forest Highlands Golf Club.  “In middle school I started to play competitively, and my dad and I started travelling around to a few different tournaments.”  While he played many sports throughout middle school, Lowe decided when he entered his freshman year of high school  at Brophy College Prep, “I wanted to play something in college, and I chose to specialize in golf.”

Lowe’s collegiate career did not begin at Notre Dame, however.  “I committed to Arizona State the summer between my junior and senior year of high school, and I had a great experience there.”  But by the end of his first year at ASU, Lowe came to realize that his goals for the future had changed—he no longer anticipated turning pro after college and was interested in pursuing business.  He discussed this with his coach and they agreed that Lowe could benefit from transferring to “a university that was a little further from home and could hopefully open up some more doors for me.”

Lowe had considered coming to Notre Dame out of high school, and thus he “was fortunate enough to already have a relationship with the coach,” making Notre Dame his number one choice for a transfer.  By taking some time off from his tournaments after his freshman year and enrolling in summer courses at Arizona State, Lowe earned admission to the university and joined the golf team as a sophomore.

In addition to his time on the golf team, a major aspect of Lowe’s Notre Dame experience has been his faith journey.  An agnostic when he arrived at Notre Dame, Lowe “started going to, through the encouragement of one of my teammates, a non-denominational Bible study group called Notre Dame Christian Athletes.  I would go to church with those guys every once in a while and, in addition to that, I started to meet a couple of other individuals through my classes who were very strong in, particularly, their Catholic faith.”

These relationships led Lowe to question his own faith and begin to think seriously about religious questions, particularly the Incarnation.  If the Incarnation really happened, Lowe realized, “it’s going to redefine the way that I choose to live my life.”  Particularly influential in prompting Lowe to consider the Catholic Church was a course he took with John Cavadini, Professor of Theology, called “The Catholic Faith.”

“Professor Cavadini has had a profoundly positive impact on me and has been a big part of my experience here at Notre Dame.  Largely through that course, and through a series of meetings with Cavadini and Monsignor [Michael] Heintz, I chose to enter the Church on August 21, 2014.”  Lowe was baptized, confirmed, and received first communion in the Log Chapel.  He has come to believe that it was “providential” that he was fortunate enough to attend Notre Dame and to have been “exposed to the individuals that I did who helped form and help me grow in my faith.”

Closely connected to Lowe’s conversion was his decision to major in theology.  Transfer students are not admitted into the Mendoza College of Business, so Lowe (who had studied finance at Arizona State) chose to pursue a major in international economics at Notre Dame.  He decided to switch to theology in the spring of his junior year, in the midst of “discerning whether or not I wanted to enter the Church, and just discerning what kind of role I wanted faith to play in my life, more broadly speaking.”  Why not use his last three semesters, Lowe thought, “to really try to come to terms with these questions that have been raised this past year, so that I can hopefully build a foundation for the rest of my life?”  Among the courses he is currently enrolled in, Lowe is particularly enjoying his two directed readings courses on Augustine’s Confessions and how to maintain one’s faith in varying circumstances with Cavadini and Monsignor Heintz, respectively.

Lowe’s time as an intern at Notre Dame’s Investment Office has also been a formative part of his college experience.  The relationship between the Investment Office and the Notre Dame student body is very unique among major universities, Lowe said, because the people who work there “don’t view themselves as only responsible for managing and growing the endowment; they also view an aspect of their profession to be mentors, role models, and professors for the student body.”  Lowe met a member of the management team at a meeting of Notre Dame Christian Athletes, and later met with him for lunch.  Lowe expected to hear stock advice on the proper courses to take and internships to pursue to attain a good job out of college, but instead was asked about how he would define success after graduation—“What’s going to be important to you?  What kind of things are you going to value?”

This approach raised a lot of questions for Lowe, and led him to think more seriously about his plans for the future.  By developing relationships with members of the investment team, he was able to obtain an internship at the Investment Office between his junior and senior years.  “I had an absolutely phenomenal experience with them,” Lowe said.  “I learned a lot, and that office in general has been a huge part of my undergraduate experience here.”

After graduation, Lowe will spend a month working with a hedge fund, Sorin Capital Management, in Stamford, Connecticut.  On July 1, he will head to Antigua, Guatemala, for a year of service in an orphanage run by Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos.  “I’ll be down there for 12 months teaching basic elementary classes to these kids as well as helping out with extra-curricular, likely sports-related activities with them.”  Lowe will also be studying for and taking the first and second levels of the Chartered Financial Analyst exam while in Guatemala.

Among the things that Lowe will miss most about his time at Notre Dame are the people and the many opportunities to strengthen one’s faith.  “We’re around such a highly concentrated population of high-achieving, highly intellectual, highly integral people, and I don’t know if I’ll have another experience like this,” Lowe said.  “I don’t know if I’ll ever be surrounded by that concentration of people.”

At Notre Dame, Lowe noted, it’s relatively easy to find strong, faith-based communities, but it can be much harder to find that after graduation.  Lowe hopes that as he embarks “on this journey I’ll be on for these next 12 months in Connecticut and Guatemala, hopefully in the midst of that when I’m away from this tight-knit community I can take the lessons that I’ve learned from here and apply them to the real world, to my life outside of Notre Dame.”

“The biggest thing I’ll miss,” Lowe concluded, “is the people and the day-to-day interactions with so many people that I really care about.”

Tim Bradley is a junior studying economics and theology and living in St. Edward’s Hall. Contact him at tbradle5@nd.edu.