What Soren Lind calls a coincidence, others may call fate. Lind committed to the USF men’s golf team only two weeks after being followed by a scout while playing on the Danish national team for a tournament in Austria during his senior year of high school. Though he had never visited the Hilltop, Lind had the chance to check out the city with his older brother who came to the West Coast in his own college golf search two years prior to Lind’s graduation. Though he didn’t know it at the time, Lind’s interest in the city would inform his future decision of committing to USF.
“It’s just so different. There are so many small neighborhoods all around. I mean, you can walk two blocks, and you will be at Haight Street, and then two more blocks, and you will be in a family neighborhood. So, there are so many cities within the city,” said Lind in describing his favorite aspect of San Francisco. “This is my fifth year, and I still have so many spots that I still need to discover.”
Following his decision to commit to USF, Lind moved from Denmark to California and accomplished a range of achievements—seven top-10 finishes in his career on the men’s golf team and a first place win at the Seattle University Redhawk Invitational his senior year. As a current graduate student, he was recently named to the 2021-22 Preseason All-West Coast Conference Team.
Lind’s interest in golf began at eight years old, as he watched his grandparents take his older brother out to the course and found himself longing to play as he stayed at home. He would not start to take the sport more seriously until five years later. Together, he and his older brother found their shared passion on the links. Lind’s brother committed to a university in the South, Lindsey Wilson College in Columbia, Kentucky.
“Sometimes I forget when I was a kid and I was just running around on the course and just playing around having fun, and sometimes when we were playing tournaments now if you shoot a bad route you’re like ‘This is the worst,’ [but] I get to be out here doing what I enjoy,” Lind said. “Don’t take [life] too seriously, you’ve got to wake up every day and have fun with what you do.”
Though studying across the world would become one of Lind’s greatest personal accomplishments, the transition from studying English in school to speaking it in an everyday context was a strain. “All of a sudden, I couldn’t say the things I had on my mind, like I really had to construct a sentence,” Lind said. While the language barrier and the cultural differences of the West Coast posed as an initial obstacle, Lind found that the openness of Americans to engage in conversation and talking to his roommate helped in his transition to San Francisco. “… there’s still a lot of social norms that are different, the way you interact over here compared to my culture, which I think is great. I always think it’s great seeing different cultures and how people communicate, but in the first couple months it was at first a bit to take in.”
An economics major, Lind is expected to graduate in 2022. From there, he plans to play golf professionally and is open to moving internationally if need be.
