"She (Clau) has emerged this year as our leader on the team and has led the team in scoring in every tournament but one," Head Coach Dianne Dailey said. "Her game has just gotten so much more solid over the years and we can really rely on her for a low score at most of the tournaments, so that's really been helpful.

"She's been our workhorse, I guess, in a lot of ways. What's happened though, in addition to her good scores, is she's a leader on the course as well as off the course. She has a really good work effort, she practices hard, she puts in a lot of extra time, she wants to be good and I think she's really dedicated this year to seeing how good she can be and has done very, very well."

A big part of Clau's improvement came from her work during the summer. A native of Barcelona, Clau returned home to Spain to work on her game. The work started paying off even before the season started. She won two tournaments, the Spanish Junior International and the Grand Prix of Chiberto, in Europe over the summer while also placing third in the Spanish Amateur Championship, finishing second in the European Ladies Individual Amateur Championship. Clau feels that the summer success had something to do with this year's improved play.

"I practiced all summer long," she said. "My game kind of got better at the end of last spring, and then over the summer it just showed up, all the results from working, and then it's just kept going right now."

The fifth Spanish player that Dailey has coached, Clau's "recruitment" consisted of teammate and good friend junior Maria Beautell telling Dailey she had another player coming. Amazingly, none of the Spanish golfers has needed a recruiting trip from Dailey to be convinced to come.

"Maria had committed to come here and she called me after she had committed and signed and said she had a friend from Spain who wanted to come also," Dailey said. "So I started writing her back and forth and it worked out and she came.

"I've had five Spanish players and I've not ever been to Spain É to recruit. It's sort of all word of mouth, which is wonderful."

While Clau says she feels at home on the Reynolda campus, things were not always so. Unsurprisingly, moving across the ocean to totally new surroundings was not an easy transition.

"Freshman year was very, very tough," Clau said. "I had to learn the language, adjust to a new, different life and being so far away from home and then trying to catch up with work and practicing everyday, four hours a day, it was just too much, too overwhelming."

Considering that and the amount of time she has to put into golf, Clau's academic record may be even more impressive than her athletic one.

"She's majoring in mathematical business, which is a very difficult major, and has something like a 3.7 average, she's really, really done well," Dailey said. "She's on track to be an All-American and will be an Academic All-American as well. She brings both the student as well as the athlete to the golf course everyday and it's wonderful. She's really a true student athlete."

Clau and the Deacons have one more tournament, the Bryan National Collegiate, which they co-host at Bryan Park Golf Course in Greensboro April 5-7, before they turn their attention to the postseason. First up will be the ACC Championships April 19-21. As usual, Duke, currently ranked No. 2 in the country will be favored, but Clau believes this team is capable of beating the Blue Devils.

"Oh, (we're) definitely (capable) of winning the ACCs and finishing for sure top-10 in NCAAs," she said.

While Duke is certainly a big obstacle, Clau feels that the team took an important step with their strong showing during last year's ACCs.

"Definitely last season it was like they were almost unreachable, and then all the sudden we almost got them," she said. "So it kind of made us realize that we're not that far from them."

While the ACC Championships are important, much of the focus for the team is the NCAAs. And, despite last year's disappointing showing in the NCAA Regionals, where the Deacs finished one shot from the eighth place finish they needed to qualify for the finals, Clau has no worries of not making the final field. "(Making the finals) shouldn't be (a problem)," she said. "Last year it shouldn't have been either, and we missed it by one stroke, but supposedly we should make it. We're not very worried about it."

The Deacons have already sustained the level of success they enjoyed during last season. Now they will try to improve on last year's finish.