Bill Montigel Position: Head Coach | 24th Season Alma Mater: Idaho State | 1976

Contact Information - b.montigel@tcu.edu | (817) 257-7646

One of the most-decorated coaches in the history of TCU Athletics, Bill Montigel opens his 24th season as head men's golf coach in 2011-12 and 33rd year overall as a member of the Horned Frog family. Since becoming the face of Frog golf, Montigel has provided the blueprint for building one of the nation's top collegiate golf programs.

Montigel's tenure has been marked by consistent success, highlighted by the program's current 22-year streak of NCAA Regional participation. The Frogs are one of only four NCAA Division I teams to earn a regional bid each of the last 22 years under the same head coach along with Clemson, Florida and UNLV. Only 15 programs have amassed the same streak with numerous head coaches.

TCU golf's current postseason run is unparalleled in the history of Horned Frog Athletics. The streak is by far the longest all-time for any Frog squad and six years more than their counterparts from the TCU women's golf team, which currently owns the No. 2 spot in school history with 16 straight regional bids.

TCU has not limited its goals simply to reaching the postseason under Montigel's watch. The program has collected eight conference championships in the past 15 years, in addition to appearing in the NCAA Championships 12 times since 1991. The 1997 squad, led by former All-American and current PGA Tour pro J.J. Henry, tied for seventh place for the Frogs' best-ever national finish. That success was nearly duplicated in 2009, as a third-place individual effort by Tom Hoge helped boost the squad to ninth place.

Several individuals have flourished under Montigel's watchful eye. Henry and Hoge are among a select group of three former Frogs who have recorded top-3 medals at the NCAA Championships during his tenure. Henry tied for runner-up honors in 1998, while Adam Rubinson duplicated the feat in 2002. Henry cemented his TCU legacy in 1998 by becoming the school's first three-time All-American in 1998. He capped his illustrious career by being named Golfweek/Taylor Made Co-College Player of the Year. Overall, Montigel has coached 11 different players to 16 All-America honors on the links.

The individual success has extended to the conference level, with five players having earned league golfer of the year honors. During one stretch in the early 2000's, Frogs were named Conference USA Golfer of the Year three straight seasons (J.J. Kileen, Adam Meyer and Rubinson).

TCU has made a habit of sending golfers on to professional careers with Montigel at the helm. Henry has made the biggest splash, having been a fixture on the PGA Tour for the last decade. The 2006 season saw Henry finish No. 29 on the Tour's money list, take home the Buick Championship and compete for the United States during both the Ryder Cup and World Cup.

Hoge became TCU's newest addition to the professional ranks in 2011, earning an exemption to his first PGA Tour event, the RBC Canadian Open, with a win at the Players Cup in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He made history by becoming the first golfer since the Canadian Tour's inception in 1981 to win a tournament after advancing through the event's qualifying stage. The victory earned Hoge a two-year exemption on the Canadian Tour.

Other former Montigel pupils who have gone on to experience success on both the Nationwide Tour and Gateway Tour include Kileen, Rubinson, Colby Beckstrom, Franklin Corpening, Bret Guetz, Drew Laning, Adam Meyer, James Sacheck, David Shultz, Sal Spallone and Drew Stoltz.

Montigel's rise in the collegiate golf ranks has been well-chronicled from a coach who started out with limited exposure to his particular collegiate sport to becoming one of the nation's most successful coaches. While his approach has proven solid, it was his arrival upon the collegiate golf scene that perhaps raised a smattering of eyebrows.

Prior to the 1987 campaign, Montigel served eight seasons as an assistant basketball coach and top recruiter at TCU under legendary coach Jim Killingsworth. Several of Montigel's recruiting gems were key performers on the Frogs' back-to-back Southwest Conference championship squads in 1986 and 1987.

One of Montigel's prized recruits was an undersized guard from Hollywood, Calif., named Jamie Dixon, who went on to help lead the Frogs to their back-to-back SWC titles before becoming one of the top minds in all of college basketball as the current head coach at Pittsburgh.

When Killingsworth retired at the end of 1987 season, Montigel's career took a dramatically-altered path. The TCU administration had to look no further than the men's basketball office to find its next men's golf coach. As a graduate student at Oklahoma State, it was his friendship with legendary Cowboys' golf coach and current OSU Athletics Director Mike Holder that truly kindled his interest in golf. Knowing that he could recruit, organize and motivate, Montigel added some of the valuable lessons he learned in basketball and applied them towards building and maintaining a top-ranked golf program.

It took Montigel just three seasons to turn a mediocre program into a contender at the conference, regional and national levels. In his first 14 campaigns, TCU captured nine tournaments, an impressive feat considering the lofty competition. The Frogs have taken another step forward in the new millennium, capturing 19 team titles in the last 11 seasons. The squad has added 16 individual tournament titles since 2000, compared to only 16 in the previous 20 years combined.

After taking over the program and beginning to fill the roster with his own players, Montigel guided the Frogs to a surprising turnaround in the SWC, as TCU finished in the top-five in seven of their final nine seasons as a conference affiliate, including finishing second on three occasions. The Frogs had finished first or second in the SWC only four times in 40 years prior to the new head coach's arrival.

Montigel's program started up its impressive streak of NCAA Regional play in 1990, when the squad climbed to second place in the SWC following a last-place finish one year earlier. While the team finished 12th that year at regionals, the Frogs' strong foundation had been set. TCU reached the NCAA Championships seven of the next eight seasons, including a school-record five consecutive bids between 1994 and 1998.

The 1997 and 1998 seasons proved to be banner campaigns for TCU, as the squads notched Montigel's first two conference championships with back-to-back WAC titles. Henry highlighted his outstanding senior year in 1998 by sealing the Frogs' second-straight conference championship with a hole-in-one on the 17th hole in the final round of action.

Following one last WAC championship in the program's final year as a league member in 2001, the Frogs packed their bags for Conference USA in 2002, which proved to be a boon for the program. The squad won the league's championship all four years before making another move to the Mountain West in 2006.

In 2002, the NCAA selection committee chose TCU as the No. 1 seed in the NCAA Central Regional, which marked the program's first-ever top seed in a regional tournament. The Frogs landed in a tie for 11th at the NCAA Championships that season, when Rubinson matched the best-ever national showing by a Frog with a second-place finish.

The Frogs matched a school record with three tournament victories during the 2002-03 campaign, including yet another Conference USA crown, while finishing the fall ranked fourth in the country. That season, TCU totaled a school-record 234 victories, which has since twice been broken, including the current record of 298 triumphs notched during the 2008-09 campaign. Montigel's program capped off its stellar run in Conference USA when the squad claimed the 2004-05 Conference USA crown by pummeling the competition in the form of a 26-stroke victory.

Since joining the Mountain West in 2006, the Frogs have continued to make a name for themselves as one of the nation's premier programs. The 2009 campaign saw the squad go 20-2-1 against conference foes, win the school's ninth league championship and finish ninth place at the NCAA Championships. The Frogs, who started the spring ranked No. 63 nationally, reached all of these feats despite fielding one of the youngest squads in the country with a lineup that consisted of only one senior, one junior, two sophomores and two freshmen.

The squad returned to the NCAA Championships again in 2010 before falling just one spot shy of advancing through NCAA Regionals in 2011.

Montigel's ability to develop talent and his teams' ability to perform have certainly not gone unnoticed. His peers have voted him conference coach of the year seven times in his career, including four straight years from 2002 through 2005, TCU's four seasons as a member of Conference USA. The honors have placed Montigel in elite company. He is the only coach in any sport to be named coach of the year in four separate NCAA Division I conferences (Southwest Conference, WAC, Conference USA and MWC).

In 2002, Montigel was voted into the Horned Frog Classic Hall of Fame and was named TCU Coach of the Year by the Dallas All-Sports Association.

In addition to his coaching duties, Montigel remains active on the national level. He serves as a member of the United States Golf Association (USGA) and Golf Coaches Association of America (GCAA) with past stints as Chairman of the District VI Selection Committee and on the NCAA Men's Golf Committee.

Montigel and his wife, Margaret, have two children, Kelli and Thomas. Kelli graduated from TCU in 2010, while Thomas is currently a sophomore guard playing for the Frog men's basketball team.

BILL MONTIGEL YEAR-BY-YEAR