Emilyee McGiles

Emily McGiles enters her third season with the University of Kentucky women’s golf program in 2025-26 after it added an additional assistant to its coaching staff on Friday, Sept. 1, 2023.

McGiles is coming off her second season in Lexington in 2024-25, where she supported the growth and development of a rebuild team that featured four freshmen, two sophomores and one senior. Despite the young lineup, which featured several lineup combinations throughout the season, the team turned in a 291.3 scoring average through nine tournaments and 27 rounds. Their 291.3 checked-in as the fifth-best stroke average in program history. The young lineup also collected two finishes inside the top five, including second place at the Bettie Lou Evans Invitational in their own backyard at Champion Trace in September and third place at the Paradise Invitational in February. Moreover, two players collected Southeastern Conference Weekly Honors during the spring season, including Karlie Campbell (SEC Freshman of the Week) and Cathryn Brown (SEC Golfer of the Week), a testament to their development under McGiles and the coaching staff. Marta López Echevarría, the lone senior, also was handpicked to the NCAA Regional at Champion Trace in Nicholasville, Kentucky, where she put together the fourth-best tournament total of her college career (220, +4).

In McGiles’ first season at UK in 2023-24, she stepped in a program with one of its most decorated rosters on school record, which featured four players that are now playing professionally, including All-Americans Jensen Castle and Laney Frye, María Villanueva Aperribay and Marissa Wenzler. That season, the team turned in a 290.27 scoring average, which ranked second in program history, not including the COVID-19 shortened season in 2019-20. It recorded the second-best, 18-hole round in school records with a 270 (-14) at the Cougar Classic and the third-best, 54-hole tournament in school records with an 832 (-20) at the same tournament. In the postseason, Kentucky went on to finish in fifth place in stroke play at the SEC Championship – out of the 14 teams – to advance to match play for the first time in program history, before the Wildcats reached their fourth straight NCAA Regional and their 10th under head coach Golda Borst.

McGiles, an Orland Park, Illinois, native, spent her previous two years – prior to Kentucky – on the professional tours, including the Women’s All-Pro Tour and the East Coast Women’s Pro Golf Tour. In 2023, she also worked at Shadow Wood Country Club in Bonita Springs, Florida.

“I would like to thank Coach Borst and Coach (Will) Sallee for this incredible opportunity to work with them, the team and the University of Kentucky Athletics Department,” McGiles said the day she was hired. “I am looking forward to joining this amazing golf program and helping the team, both on and off the course, achieve their full potential. I am so proud to be a Wildcat!”

Before her career, McGiles was a standout golfer at Southern Illinois (2017-21).

While in Carbondale, she averaged a 77.56 scoring average over 103 career rounds, which ranks third all-time in program history. She also made 159 birdies during that timeframe, which ranks seventh all-time in program history. The Salukis heavily relied on McGiles all four seasons, and that is evident by the program using 86.4 percent of her 103 career rounds. She also helped Southern Illinois claim the 2019 Missouri Valley Conference Championship title, finishing in a tie for eighth place at 11-over-par 227.

McGiles made a pair of MVC Women’s Golf Scholar-Athlete Teams (2019, 2020), before earning a degree in exercise science from Southern Illinois in 2021.