It started with a golf cart and a grandfather. Don Todaro worked at Arch Cole Golf Course near Trico, and from the time Zachary Barlow was two years old, going to the course meant riding along with Grandpa — on the cart, on the mower, just being around the place. The game came later, naturally, the way things do when you grow up somewhere long enough to absorb them. He just kept showing up, kept playing, kept getting better. Twenty-some years later, he is the Head Men's Golf Coach at the University of Michigan.

Zach graduated from Trico High School in 2005. His high school golf years were shaped largely by two men: Gary Glidewell, the golf coach and middle school PE teacher who made the game fun and taught lessons that extended well beyond the fairway, and Ron Coleman, a math teacher with deep roots at Trico whose family has long been part of the school community. The three of them played together often — at the home course, at Chester, at courses around the region. "You are who you hang around with," Zach says. "I hung around at the golf course with a bunch of guys who love playing golf."

His high school career had one significant interruption. Sophomore year, scoliosis surgery kept him off the course — two rods and more than twenty screws in his back to correct a severe spinal curvature. He missed the state tournament that fall. It was, he says, a perspective-shifting experience. "When something very important to me in my life was in jeopardy, it was just eye-opening," he says. The following fall — his junior year — he came back and won the state championship. He finished in the top twenty as a freshman and around seventh as a senior. He qualified for state three times in four years.

From Trico, he committed to the University of Illinois, where he played golf under coach Mike Small, graduated with a sports management degree in 2010, won two Big Ten championships, and ranked 68th in the world in the amateur golf rankings at the time of graduation. He moved to Palm City, Florida, and spent roughly three and a half years playing professionally on the mini tours before concluding, honestly, that he was more of a team person than a solo act. "It's lonely and expensive," he says. "The two worst things it could possibly be."

He came back to Carbondale and worked for Jesse Barge at Kokopelli Golf Club, still playing part-time while Jesse gave him the flexibility to keep his game sharp. Then a phone call arrived from his old Illinois coach, Mike Small, who was hiring an assistant and asking Zach for a reference on another candidate. Zach didn't think much of it at the time — but the call planted a seed. When that assistant left six months later, Zach called Small directly. "Hey, I want this job." He got it. He spent five years as an assistant at Illinois before Michigan came calling in 2019.

The decision to go to Michigan came down to fit and philosophy. Zach wanted to coach at a school with a great academic reputation, because he knows that the fraction of college golfers who will ever make a living from the sport is somewhere between a tenth and half a percent. "Education is a very big piece for me," he says. Michigan was also a program with untapped potential — not historically a consistent force in college golf — and that appealed to him, too. His first two seasons were effectively erased by COVID, leaving him four real seasons of work so far. The team has climbed from around 130th in the national rankings to 57th. His stated annual goal is to win the Big Ten championship, which he describes as earning the right to compete for a national title. Michigan's last national title in golf was in 1952.

He and his wife, Abby, who grew up in Red Bud and met Zach through mutual friends, live in Ann Arbor with their daughter Shay and son Beckham. His mother, Gina, still works as a secretary at Trico. His brother Skyler played basketball for the school. The golf course behind Trico, where his grandfather worked, is where all of it began. "I don't really think, looking back, you ever really know where decisions can take you," Zach says. "But it all traces back to Trico."