While NCAA golfers might laugh if they were challenged to shoot their age, Barry University's Judy Street might think it was more possible than funny.

Street is a senior. Really a senior. At age 61, Street completed her eligibility by leading the Buccaneers golf team to a second-place finish at the Division II Women's Golf Championships. Street fired rounds of 78, 76, 83 and 84 to finish in a tie for eighth in an event with 47 other players young enough to be Street's daughters, perhaps even granddaughters.

But Street is not just a 61-year-old who joined the squad on a lark. She has a history with golf that started, well, with her first step, which she took while with her dad (a golf professional) on a putting green at a course in her hometown of Old Hickory, Tennessee. At the age of nine, Street competed in her first tournament, and defeated her aunt in the consolation round, to boot.

Street began her collegiate career 43 years ago on a golf scholarship at the University of Miami (Florida). As a freshman in 1959, Street won the Collegiate Championships held at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, defeating Jo Ann Carner in a playoff.

The next year, Street was invited to become a member of the 1960 Curtis Cup team, so she took time off from school to practice. Street helped lead the decidedly underdog American team to a victory over Great Britain. Not long after returning home, Street married, and while she was pregnant with her first child, she won her sixth Tennessee State Amateur.

In 1970, while pregnant with her fourth child, Judy decided to stop playing the amateur circuit. Then in the mid 1990s, she reunited with some former members of the 1960 Curtis Cup team and picked up where she left off, playing in the senior amateur circuit.

"It was a joke in the beginning," Street told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel earlier this year. "(White) encouraged me to come back to school, finish my degree and play for the team if I could get my game in competitive shape. It seemed like something that would be fun, and I wanted to see if I could do it."

Her Division II peers quickly saw that she could. Barry sophomore Noel Bishop told the Sun Sentinel that the first time she saw Street swing, she thought Street could be an asset to the team if she were younger. "I now realize that being young isn't going to matter," Bishop said. "She's an asset anyway."

Street's 321 total at the Division II championships was Barry's best individual score. And as for academics, the liberal studies major has aced them, too. Street is in an adult continuing-education program and is expected to earn her degree in 2003.

(Barry sports information director Keith Smith contributed to this article.)