Peggy Kirby - Inducted 2009
The Sioux Falls native is among South Dakota's greatest amateur golfers, having won the women's stroke play championship five times – 1973, 1974, 1975, 1977 and 1982 – and the Sioux Falls city tournament 17 times. Since the state women's tourney switched from match play to stroke play in the 1960s, no one has won it more often than Peggy (Schock) Kirby. She is also a nine-time runner-up in the event. Her golf career began at age 11, under the watchful eye of Elmwood Golf Course pro Ev Comstock, and she refined her game under the tutelage of Minnehaha Country Club pro Terry Crouch. She was the state's Female Athlete of the Year for 1973, when she won the last of three state junior titles, her first state women's title and her first city title. Kirby played collegiately at Arizona State, where she helped the Sun Devils capture the 1975 national championship. In 1978, she qualified for the U.S. Women's Open in Indianapolis. Competing against the game's best, she made the cut and finished as the seventh-lowest amateur. She turned pro in 1978, barely missing qualifying for the LPGA Tour. After regaining her amateur status and sitting out competitive golf for a couple summers after the birth of her first child, she returned to the SDGA scene and won her fifth state title in 1982. She then "semi-retired" from competitive golf while she raised her family, though she did play enough the next decade to earn runner-up honors three times in the state tourney and team with husband Kevin to win the SDGA husband-wife title in 1994. She and Patty Coddington won the state two-woman title in 2001. Kirby won the SDGA Pre-Senior Championship in 2006. She is currently the women's golf coach at Augustana. In five years, she has transformed the Vikings into one of the top programs in NCAA Division II, culminating with the program's first-ever appearance in the national tournament in 2008. Augustana won its first-ever North Central Conference title in 2007. She was inducted into the South Dakota Golf Association Hall of Fame in 2005 in her first year of eligibility.
