Anthroponymy in Men's College Golf

We’re continuing using our extensive dataset of Men’s DI College Golf rosters.

I pulled roster data directly from team websites, season by season, all the way back to 2005–06. The scrape produced 40,791 player–year rows, of which 9,310 are freshmen entries. About 86% of those include usable “From” information.

We’ve used this dataset to look into The Declining Rate of U.S.-Born Men’s DI Golfers, The States most Impacted by up-tick in International Recruiting (Men’s DI Golf), The rise of European recruits in DI men’s golf, and we’ve seen how the average college golfer has gotten taller.

This week, let’s look into names. First, let’s start with a pop quiz:

The most common first name is found 172 times for freshmen in the dataset. 1.85% of the freshmen in this dataset has had this first name. I can immediately think of about 10 players I know with this first name. Although the name is still very common, it’s popularity has declined throughout the period:

The name is…

Michael!

Here is the top-10 list:

Just over 1 in 8 college golfers over the past 20 years has been named one of these 10 names - just over one per team.

None of the names on the top-10 list is surprising to me as they are common American names.
When we look a little closer though, their frequencies are on the decline. Below is the graph showing counts of these ten first names by incoming year for freshmen. It will appear that the popularity was increasing up until about 2012, but most of this is due to data coverage being more stable from 2010.

So why the decrease from the 2010s?
Yep, you guessed it - international recruiting. These names are far less common for international recruits, which we’ve seen have progressively taken more roster spots during this period.
There could be other small effects, such as the popularity of those names in the general public declining. We’ve also seen how total DI roster spots in men’s golf have decreased.

Last Names

According to a 2010 report from the United States Census Bureau, the top-5 surnames in the United States were Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, and Jones - in that order. Unsurprisingly, all of these names are very frequent in college golf as well. Smith is the most common last name in the dataset:

I’ve published this page on the Men’s DI Golf Rosters 2025-2025 dashboard. You can play around with the data yourself.

For example, here’s an interesting graph, reflecting the up-tick in Asian freshman. Lee, Kim, and Park grouped:

Regardless of you first or last names, I welcome you to subscribe to this free newsletter 🙏

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P.S. Thank you to David Tenneson of 5count4 for helping me clean some of this data! Check out his fantastic Substack here:

5 Count 4: College Golf History

All things college golf with an emphasis on the somewhat-forgotten past

By David Tenneson

Links:
- Men’s DI Golf Rosters 2025-2025 dashboard
- The Declining Rate of U.S.-Born Men’s DI Golfers
- Shifts in Height | Division I rosters over the past 20 years 📊
- How can a recruit best get a college coach’s attention? (Recruiting)