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Annika Sorenstam did not lead the Arizona Wildcats to an NCAA golf championship, but Marisa Baena did.

Lorena Ochoa did not win a national championship while at Arizona, but Jenna Daniels did.

Women's golf at the UA has been so unpredictable that former Arizona coach Greg Allen believed the Wildcats could win the 2008 NCAA title, or be a clear favorite, with a lineup that featured Paraguay's Julieta Granada, Spain's Audrey Zwanck, Texas whiz Lauren Espinosa and Phoenix's Esther Choe, last year's top American high school player.

But when the Wildcats tee off Tuesday at the NCAA championships in Albuquerque, their lineup will not include Granada or Choe, who reneged on their commitments to play for Arizona and turned pro. Nor will it include Zwanck, who got homesick and didn't return to school after Christmas break, or Espinosa, who quit school after her freshman season.

Not only that, Allen bolted Arizona last summer to become the head coach at Vanderbilt.

So it is somewhat amazing that first-year UA coach Shelly Haywood takes a team ranked as high as 12th in the country into the NCAA tournament. Not only that, Arizona senior Alison Walshe, who was never on Allen's long-range (or short-range blueprint), is a consensus All-American who probably has as good a chance as anyone to win the NCAA individual title.

Operative phrase here: All-American.

Walshe played her freshman season at Boston College in 2004, transferred to Tulane in 2005 (where she was the Conference USA player of the year) and then spent a chaotic redshirt season, 2006, taking courses at SMU after she and her Tulane teammates were displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

"I could write a book about my college career,'' Walshe said while practicing at the Omni Tucson National a few days ago. "Pretty wild, huh?''

Walshe was co-medalist at the NCAA West Regional two weeks ago and has won six tournaments in her two Arizona seasons. To put it in perspective: only Sorenstam, Ochoa and Baena had more productive UA golf careers

If the Wildcats are to finish in the Top 10 in Albuquerque — Haywood insists she likes the sound of "top five'' better — Walshe will likely need to do what Baena did in 1996 and Daniels in 2000: become the top player in college golf.

Says Haywood: "When we were at the NCAA regionals, we didn't play well the first round. When Alison walked off the 18th green she looked at the scoreboard and saw we were in 12th place. She said, 'That can't be right, is it? That's not acceptable for Arizona.' "

Two days later the Wildcats were fourth and Walshe was first.

The irony at play here is that Walshe initially contacted Arizona when she decided to leave Boston College in 2004. She is from the greater Boston area (Westford, Mass.) and decided that to accelerate her goal of playing on the LPGA Tour she needed to play golf in warmer weather.

The Wildcats had already committed their scholarship money for 2005 so Walshe settled on Tulane. A horrific hurricane followed. When she sought a third school, she visited USC, Auburn, Arizona State and the UA.

"Our program's history, with Lorena and Annika, was a factor,'' she says. "When I played at Tulane and Boston College, if I saw someone carrying an Arizona bag, I automatically thought they were big-time players. I liked that."

The conclusion of Walshe's amateur golf days are aligned for a fascinating finish.

She received her UA degree in interdisciplinary studies a few days ago. Saturday morning, she will fly from the NCAA finals in Albuquerque to Scotland, where she will begin preparations for the Curtis Cup, a women's amateur competition based on the Ryder Cup format. It will be played May 30 to June 2 at the Old Course in St. Andrews. After that, Walshe will attempt to qualify for the U.S. Women's Amateur; she reached the round of 16 last summer.

Then comes a long-anticipated move to what Walshe hopes will be a long career on the LPGA Tour.

"It's kind of funny that I grew up in Ireland until I was 5, but have never been to Scotland,'' she says. Her father, John, moved to Boston in 1990 to follow a career path that has taken him to Sun Microsystems; he is operations manager. She has neither an Irish accent nor one from New England.

She has become, instead, an almost accidental Arizonan.

"The next few weeks are going to be exciting,'' she says. "After all I've gone through to get to this point, it's going to be pretty sweet.''