Finance junior Leonardo Novella is a member of the UTRGV Men’s Golf Team. After graduating from Istituti Scolastici Cardinal C. Baronio, in his home country of Italy, Novella was recruited by the university.
Q: What are some of your hobbies outside of golf?
A: “Besides golf, we don’t have a lot of free time, sometimes. My main hobby is playing golf, yeah, but also hanging out with friends and, sometimes, go fishing, or going to the beach, or going to the gym. But apart from that, we don’t have a lot of free time. We just like to go and practice, and that’s the main thing.”
Q: When did you get into golf?
A: “I started getting into it. It was just out of nowhere. I went to a birthday party with my family in a country club, back at home in Italy, and me and my brother just figured out the game of golf because the restaurant where we went was inside the country club. So, we just saw the range and we started hitting some balls, and from there, we just started playing golf. My parents don’t play golf at all.”
Q: What is your favorite movie?
A: “I do like ‘Interstellar.’ Stuff like that. I love ‘Star Wars’ … sci-fi kinda movies. I’m not the type of guy that stays in and watches movies the entire time, but I enjoy them.”
Q: How do you train to be better at golf?
A: “The training that we have is specifically aimed to improve some parts that we feel like every time needs to be improved. I don’t have a specific training method every time. I just like to discover new stuff, and I feel like that right now … the training schedule is a little bit more of a mental kind of training. It’s more … like, we keep going every single time, and we just try to get a lot of confidence after every drill that we do. It’s nothing too specific or nothing too related to swing, or movement or stuff like [that]. It’s more of a kind of trying to get confidence every single time, more and more confidence to go and play tournaments. The best we can do.”
Q: What is your proudest moment in your career?
A: “One of the proudest moments would probably be getting to the national team back at home, and getting to the team over here. Getting recruited over here, and being able to play not only in Italy, but internationally. Playing over here, making a name for myself, not only in Italy, as I said, and winning with this team two times. We won [The Big Texan competition March 27-28] and we won two years ago as well.”
–Compiled by Julien Juarez
