Dan Moon and Anne Hutto met on a golf course in Auburn, Alabama while at college in the early 2000s and golf continued to be a major part of the couple’s lives. They married, moved to Florida, and eventually started a company bearing their name. 

The Moon Golf company began life in 2015 when the Moons took over an existing retail golf store. Leveraging their prior golf retail experience and understanding of the custom fitting experience, Anne and Dan have grown the Moon Golf business to the point where they recently opened a third location back where it all began. 

Why does a company started 70 miles east or Orlando and now based in Alabama sponsor a tournament for Louisville, KY, staged in Florida? 

The answer lies with former Louisville head coach Courtney (Swaim) Trimble who was Anne (Hutto) Moon’s teammate at Auburn. 

In 2018, the pair worked together to inaugurate the Moon Golf Invitational, held in Florida. 

“I love the idea of getting behind women’s golf and good college golf because the local girls around here in the high schools, a lot of them are going to come be volunteers in the tournament,” Moon told Sports Illustrated. ahead of the inaugural tournament in 2018. “… Being a female business owner and having been a female college golfer, I just thought, How cool would it be to have our own college tournament?” 

Trimble is now the President and CEO of FORE HIRE, a recruitment firm helping female college golfers into the workplace. Her former assistant and now head coach Whitney Young has continued the tournament and Trimble still acts as tournament director.

Ten of the players on the final 2024-25 ANNIKA award fall watch list will be in this year’s field including players from LSU, FSU, Wake Forest, Texas, and Auburn.

Furman’s Natalie Srinivisan earned her third individual victory in the COVID-shortened 2019-20 season at the Moon Golf Invitational, and went on to be voted the ANNIKA Award winner as the top player in women’s D1 golf that year. This made Furman one of only two schools (UCLA was the other) to have both a male and female player earn the Haskins and ANNIKA awards, the equivalent of the Heisman Award in college golf. 

The 2022 individual Moon Golf medalist Ingrid Lindblad of LSU etched her name on the ANNIKA Award trophy just last year. 

2021 was the year of Pauline Roussin-Bouchard. The South Carolina super sophomore opened with a sizzling 9-under par 63 to set the tournament and program 18-hole record. 

The second round was even better for the Gamecocks as they broke the tournament record with a 275/-13 behind Pauline’s 67. South Carolina ended up taking home both team and individual titles in record setting fashion.

In 2023, current Florda State teammates Lottie Woad and Mirabel Ting matched the tournament record of 203 (-13) set by Roussin-Bouchard and went to a playoff for medalist honors. 

Both players sat just one shot out of the lead going into the final round but they were not rooting for each other on this occasion. Ting, playing for Augusta, jumped into the lead with a fantastic 68 only to be caught by Leila Raines of Michigan State who shot a final round 65 (-7). 

Ting ultimately secured her first collegiate victory with a walk-off 50-foot putt.

LSU ran away with the team title in 2023, breaking a host of records along the way. Not only did they set the 18- (274/-14), 36- (550/-26), and 54-hole scoring records (834/-30), they also set the record for lowest round drop score (71/-1) and total drop score (217/+1). 

All five Tigers finished inside the top 25 with Ingrid Lindblad (2022 winner) and Carla Tejedo Mulet finishing T5.

Ingrid Lindblad recorded top-10 finishes — 9th, 1st, T5, T2 —  in all four years playing this event, finishing up by going close again in 2024 when LSU became the first team to win this event multiple times. 

Maisie Filler (Florida) earned her third consecutive tournament medalist honors - and the #1 individual ranking - over a who’s-who top 10 that included Lindblad and her teammate Aine Donegan, Rachel Kuehn (Wake Forest), eventual NCAA champion Adela Cernousek (Texas A&M), Katie Poots (UCF), Mirabel Ting and Lottie Woad (FSU), Latanna Stone (LSU), Celina Sattelkau (Vanderbilt), and Kennedy Carroll (Augusta). 

The first three Moon Golf medalists — Alice Chen (Furman), Lauren Hartlage (Louisville), Natalie Srinivasan (Furman) — all received invites to the inaugural Augusta National Women’s Amateur (ANWA) in 2019 just months after competing in Florida. 

This year, both the 2022 ANWA champ Anna Davis (Auburn) and the reigning ANWA champion Lottie Woad will look to add the Moon Golf trophy to their impressive collection of individual titles.

The goal for the Moon Golf Invitational has been to become one of the top tournaments in the early Spring season calendar. In its first year, the event hosted four of the top 50 teams in the country. 

This year, 14 of the teams in the field rank inside the top 50 with three of those currently ranked inside the top 10. There’s a decent chance therefore that the team that steals the Moon in 2025 might be placing it next to the NCAA championship trophy in the home facility at the end of the season.