TORONTO, ONTARIO | Salimah Mussani is a softie. And she’ll be the first to say it.
So, when the past winner on the Epson Tour found out she was the inaugural recipient of a generous grant from the Golf Canada Foundation via a family donor to help her coach the next generation of Canadian girls to the best of her ability, it hit hard.
“I feel like 50 more pounds came onto my shoulders with that announcement,” said Mussani. “But it’s 50 pounds I feel like I can carry.”
The announcement came in late May in Toronto, as the Golf Canada Foundation and the Canadian Olympic Foundation announced a major gift of $2 million (CAD) from the Stollery Family that will see the official title of the Women’s National Team head coach renamed as Team Canada Stollery Family Women’s Head Coach and Stollery Family Olympic Women’s Head Coach.
Mussani was named the top coach on the women’s side of Golf Canada’s national team just three weeks prior to the announcement. The $2-million gift is the first of its kind for a Canadian National Sport Federation and the first for a Canadian Olympic Team coach. The monies will help fund the Women’s Head Coach position over a 30-year term.
“It’s just unprecedented,” said Mussani.
Mussani has a lengthy resume and was a worthy choice to lead Canada’s next generation of female professional golfers. Along with her Epson Tour victory she’s teed it up on the LPGA Tour and captured a solid handful of titles through her junior, amateur, and early professional career.
Graduates of Canada’s National Team program include both of Canada’s current representatives on the LPGA Tour – Brooke Henderson and Maude-Aimee Leblanc – along with Maddie Szeryk on the Epson Tour.
According to Golf Canada’s Chief Sport Officer, Kevin Blue, the goal for the country is to have 30 golfers on the LPGA and PGA Tours combined in 10 years.
Mussani, Blue says, is the perfect person to lead the way.
“She has a rare ability to combine technical coaching expertise with a high, high amount of emotional intelligence and collaboration skills. Both of which are necessary to be a national coach,” says Blue. “You have to teach and coach the game but also facilitate with personal coaches and collaborate with other people that influence the players game and I think she’ll be excellent at both of those things.’
Mussani grew up as a multi-sport athlete living in Burlington, Ont. – about 35 miles from Toronto’s downtown core. He father was a doctor and was told once, Mussani recalls with a laugh, that doctors don’t work on Wednesday, they play golf. That was when she was 13. Her father took her to hit balls. A gentleman at the course saw how she was striking it and immediately told her father that he needed to “invest in her.”
Six months later Mussani was competing. At the same time, however, she was a high-level field hockey player. She says it was “pretty easy” to pick an individual sport versus a team sport to really commit to moving forward.
“I was mostly in team sports at the time, and I hated losing. Golf was an opportunity where I was in charge,” she explains. “My success was all about what I put in, I got out. Once I started winning… when you’re a kid and you win you think whatever it is you’re winning at is fun. That was it.”
Unfortunately, Mussani had plenty of health issues just as her professional career was taking off. She was diagnosed with lupus, had her spleen removed, and was forced out of playing professionally. There were, she says, “a lot” of highs and lows.
She pivoted to coaching and found herself as part of Stanford’s team as an assistant. She continued to hold coaching roles at the University of British Columbia, and then with Team Canada.
“She’s a great communicator. She has a nice ability to get in on the players’ level. She’s got a lot of experience as a player and coach so she can relate on having that athlete be successful… she’s proven herself up this point being very efficient at what she does,” says Tristan Mullally, the former Women’s Head Coach who now heads Golf Canada’s talent identification team.
“It’s impressive to watch, it’s impressive to see how she interacts with players and see how to get the most out of them.”
Blue, whose C-suite role with Golf Canada is to partially oversee the efforts of Mussani and Mullally, says the squad’s leaders will have extra motivation with the funding in place to back up their work.
Canada, he says, has often been seen as a “plucky underdog” in golf – a role he says the country wants to relinquish. It may only have two full-time members of the LPGA Tour, but young girls of 12 or 13 seeing Henderson – who is from a town of only 6,000 people – become the winningest Canadian golfer of all time will have a leader in Mussani to help get them to the biggest stage.
“One of my big mantras is that (the golfers) have to demand more of themselves. (Golf) is going to demand on them and they’re going to have to demand more,” says Mussani. “This concept of lifting and climbing… if you’re going up and climbing, take someone with you.’
As far as the lifting is concerned, Mussani is ready to take the lead.
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