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It was nothing more than a courtesy call, really. At least that's how Mic Potter approached his trip to Tuscaloosa, Ala., in June, a one-day excursion taken as a favor to his friend, Alabama men's coach Jay Seawell. After all, when you've spent the previous 24 years at the same school, compiling a Hall of Fame résumé at Furman University that includes 35 wins, 10 conference titles and 16 All-Americans, you're generally not surfing HotJobs.com. Thus, he arrived with a simple mind-set for the discussion about a job opening: shake a few hands, walk around the campus and return home to resume the rest of your life.

And yet a funny thing happened on the drive back to Greenville, S.C. Turns out Potter had uncovered a new image of what his future entailed. "No one was more surprised than me. I thought for sure I would retire at Furman," Potter said. "But I just fell in love with this place."

Apparently, he wasn't the only one blown away by what he saw. Just five minutes out of town, Kim Potter turned to her husband of more than two decades and said matter of factly: "You've got to take that job."

So it was that two weekends ago Potter found himself not at the Lady Paladin Invitational, a tournament he'd been intimately involved with for the previous quarter century, but in Oxford, Miss., with his wife, watching his new school's football team play an SEC road tilt and mulling how different their world had become in the four-plus months since he took the job as the Crimson Tide's women's golf coach.

Imagine Arizona men's basketball coach Lute Olson suddenly leaving his venerable program to go coach hoops-neophyte Nebraska, or Tennessee women's coach Pat Summitt jumping ship to go to Florida State. In many respects, that's exactly what Potter -- the third-winningest active coach in women's Division I golf -- did when he uprooted from his post as director of intercollegiate golf at Furman, where he had led his teams to top-10 finishes at the NCAA Championships six times. Now he would be in charge of a program that had only gone to nationals once in school history. Potter already had established a perennial contender, a program that developed 10 LPGA Tour pros, most notably Dottie Pepper. What more was there to prove?

There was the lure of coaching in the competitive SEC, but chief among the things that grabbed Potter's attention was that the school was committed to building a support structure for the team to succeed despite its small trophy case. At his players' disposal would be the Jerry Pate Golf Center, a state-of-the-art teaching facility, as well as the Bryant Academic Center, also opened in late 2004.

"I thought it was a football school, and that would be difficult," Potter said. "But it's amazing the support they have for all athletics. If you're making progress and heading in the right direction and you look like you're going to be a winner, they love you here."

Not until he showed up at his first junior tournament this past summer, however, did Potter fully appreciate what he had done. With Potter no longer clad in purple but instead covered in crimson, it was like looking at Cal Ripken in a Texas Rangers uniform, one fellow coach joked.

Truth is, Potter has enjoyed the way that, since the start of school in August, he has been essentially a 50-year-old freshman, living in a rented apartment and attempting to find his way amid a student body of almost 21,000 (Furman's is just 2,600). So far, he has had more success learning how to navigate campus than remembering the words to the school's fight song. "I still don't have that totally down," Potter admits.

Although he's content with how he has adjusted to his new environment, saying goodbye to the old one remains a painful memory. "[Talking to my players] was awful," he recalled. "That was the worst day of my life. But the bottom line is there is never a good time to do something like that." (Perhaps it's a testament to just how influential a coach Potter is that after he announced he was heading to Alabama, two of his Furman players -- All-American Jenny Suh and Sarah Sturm -- followed suit.)

Still, the question seems to remain: Why? Why give up the comfort and serenity that came with being a coaching fixture at a school attended by your own two sons?

"I've thought about it a lot," Potter said. "It's very easy to get in a rut because you've gotten stuck in your ways. Sometimes you need to do something different and challenge yourself in a different way. I think, ultimately, that's probably why I picked the job."

By his own estimation, it will take three to four years for the team to have a real chance of hanging with the nation's elite. He got off to a great start with a victory in his first tournament with the school, its own Ann Rhoads Intercollegiate. But in the coming weeks, when the Crimson Tide play three tournaments against top-ranked squads, the reality likely will set in. You don't build a national championship contender overnight.

Potter is willing to wait, not to mention willing to work. In turn, he's discovering a whole new world he never imagined he'd experience. Moreover, he has become the embodiment of one of the best lessons he could ever teach any person who plays for him: To grow as individuals, sometimes you have to take risks. If you break with the status quo and are willing to get out of your comfort zone, you never know what you might find.

Zack Reeves, Texas-Arlington
A par on the fourth extra hole at the Louisiana Tech/Squire Creek Classic gave the sophomore his first collegiate title. After a career-best 67 in the opening round, Reeves shot a final-round 70 that tied him at 5-under 211 before he outlasted UL-Monroe's Tim Kunick and Mississippi's Chris Rogers in the playoff.

Liz Janangelo, Duke
The three-time first-team All-American won her first college title since April 2004 in convincing fashion, posting a final-round 65 for a 7-shot victory at the Stanford-Pepsi Intercollegiate. The senior's 11-under 202 also broke the Blue Devils' 54-hole school record.

Men/Women
Landfall Tradition: CC of Landfall, Nicklaus Course; Wilmington, N.C., Oct. 28-30
One of the few events that host men's and women's competitions simultaneously, the 4-year-old tournament has several unique on- and off-the-course treats for the teams that visit during Halloween weekend. For starters, the men and women share the same course, or at least nine holes of the 27-hole facility; the women playing the Pines and Ocean nine, the men using the Ocean and the Marsh. They also share the practice areas, allowing the players to interact during the event. Golfers from area high school teams assist the other 300-plus volunteers, carrying walking scoreboards with every group in the field, offering a tourlike feel to the competition. After a banquet Thursday and a buffet dinner Friday, teams are hosted for dinner Saturday by a Wilmington or Landfall resident with a connection to the school (typically a graduate of the school). "Some invite other alumni from the area to the dinner, as well," UNC-Wilmington women's coach Cindy Ho said. "It just a different experience that I think everyone enjoys."

Women
Chrysler ACC/SEC Challenge: Sandestin G&CC, Raven Course; Sandestin, Fla., Oct. 28-30
The 5-year-old event takes a bit of a hit because of the crowded fall schedule. With Duke playing the previous week at Stanford and the week after at Auburn, the two-time defending champions are missing, along with those Tigers. This should allow up-and-coming Florida to earn its second win of the 2005-06 season while offering a chance to see whether Lady Gators freshmen Mallory Blackwelder and Ornella Jouven can follow impressive performances (win and T-4, respectively) at the Lady Wildcat Invitational earlier this month.

72
Number of rounds of 65 or better shot as of Oct. 19 (out of 6,720) in men's NCAA competition.

.538
Percentage of tournaments won (seven of 13) by East Tennessee State junior Rhys Davies in the past 365 days after the junior claimed the individual title at the Bank of Tennessee Intercollegiate at The Ridges on Oct.16.

• No doubt losing a Hall of Fame coach (Potter), a second-team All-American (Suh) and another starter (Sturm) would be a devastating blow to almost any program. So it was that the Furman women's team deserves an awful lot of respect for its 5-shot win over Mississippi State in the 35th annual Lady Paladin Invitational Oct. 16. Never mind that rookie Jen Hanna's squad played on its home course and that the school had won the tournament 13 previous times; you try to overcome the summer departures Furman faced and post even a top-10 finish.

Making the feat even more impressive, the Lady Paladins also were victorious despite the absence of defending champion Monique Gesualdi, sidelined after a recent car accident. Give credit specifically to freshmen Blair Lamb and Kathleen Ekey, who picked up the slack by posting top-five finishes. The two players could have been bitter about how the coach who recruited them wasn't in Greenville, S.C., when they arrived this fall. Instead, they gave Hanna two sweet performances, not to mention the confidence of knowing that no players wearing the purple and white are feeling sorry for themselves, nor will they as the 2005-06 season rolls on.

• The UCLA men won The Prestige at PGA West by 19 shots Oct. 18, but don't expect to see the same starting lineup in place when the Bruins host the CordeValle Collegiate later this month. At the start of the season, coach O.D. Vincent decided to employ a different strategy, giving every player on his 11-man roster the opportunity to compete with the starting five in a tournament. Thus far, in three events, he's had three different lineups, with five players (Peter Campbell, Erik Flores, Chris Heintz, Daniel Im and Craig Leslie) posting top-10 finishes. "At the end of the fall, we'll determine through these results our top five players," Vincent said. Such outside-the-box thinking is why Vincent has revitalized the program in Westwood in his three-plus years there and why the 37-year-old is considered among the top up-and-coming coaches in the game.

• With the top-ranked Duke women's impressive 27-shot victory Sunday at the Stanford Pepsi Invitational, Blue Devils coach Dan Brooks grabbed win No. 92, making him the all-time leader for a women's coach in Division I golf. Brooks' breaking the mark previously held by San Jose State's Mark Gale can hardly be trivialized; a rookie coach who averages five wins for the next 18 years still won't have caught the Hall of Famer who wasn't even sure what state Duke could be found in -- he thought it was in Texas -- when first becoming aware of the position. Even more impressive is the fact that 66 of the wins have come in the last eight years. That puts Brooks on a pace of eight-plus wins a season in an era that almost unanimously is considered the most competitive in women's college golf. With all due respect to coaching greats Linda Vollstedt and Dale McNamara, not to mention Gale, Brooks' performance stands out among the crowd as the best of all time.

Ryan Herrington is a senior writer for Golf World magazine.