Sportswomen of Colorado will honor 5-time CGA Women’s Senior Player of the Year Kris Franklin and recently retired CU women’s golf coach Anne Kelly
By Gary Baines – 1/25/2025
Kris Franklin and Anne Kelly are certainly no strangers to one another. Franklin’s husband, Brent, was a longtime coach on Kelly’s women’s golf staff at the University of Colorado. And when Kris Franklin won the CGA Women’s Mid-Amateur Stroke Play title in 2021, Kelly and Colorado Golf Hall of Famer Janet Moore were quick to give her hugs and share laughs on the 18th green at Boulder Country Club.
So when the Sportswomen of Colorado named their 2024 honorees on Friday, it seemed somehow appropriate that the two people from the golf world who will be feted are Franklin and Kelly.
In all, SWOC will pay tribute to 41 people/teams across the full spectrum of sports at its 51st annual awards celebration, set for March 9 at the Hyatt Regency Denver Tech Center.
Franklin will be honored in the golf Masters category for her stellar play in 2024. She was named the CGA Women’s Senior Player of the Year for the fifth time, which marks the second most in history for that award. The former tour pro qualified for — and made the cut at — the U.S. Senior Women’s Open, finishing 54th despite struggling with her putting. And she swept the CGA’s senior women’s majors — the Senior Match Play and Senior Stroke Play — in a single season for the second time (previously in 2019). In addition, she captured the title in the CGA Women’s Mashie with Moore, her former teammate at the University of Arizona.
As for Kelly, she’s receiving a special Legacy award after retiring last spring after 27 seasons as the CU women’s golf head coach, which goes down as the longest tenure for a female head coach in school history. The Aspen native was just the second women’s golf head coach at CU, following Justi Rae Miller (1994-97). Over her years on the job, Kelly led Buffs teams to two NCAA national championship tournaments — they placed 18th in 2012 and 19th in 2018. Among her players who have gone on to play on the LPGA Tour are Jenny Coleman, Esther Lee and Robyn Choi. In December 2023, the Women’s Golf Coaches Association announced that Kelly was the recipient of the Kim Evans Award for lifetime contributions to the sport.
Kelly played her own college golf at Texas Christian University, and she helped the Horned Frogs win the NCAA title in 1983. In fact, that team was inducted into the TCU Athletics Hall of Fame. Kelly played 131 events on the LPGA Tour from 1985-93 (best finish: 20th place) before becoming a teaching professional in the early 1990s. Prior to being hired at CU, she served as head coach at North Carolina-Greensboro for a year and a half, earning Big South Coach of the Year honors in 1997.
For all of the Sportswomen of Colorado honorees, CLICK HERE.
About the Writer: Gary Baines has covered golf in Colorado continuously since 1983. He was a sports writer at the Daily Camera newspaper in Boulder, then the sports editor there, and has written regularly for ColoradoGolf.org since 2009. The University of Colorado Evans Scholar alum was inducted into the Colorado Golf Hall of Fame in 2022. He owns and operates ColoradoGolfJournal.com