SUGAR GROVE, Ill. – “Amazing Grace” started playing on Andrea Gaston’s borrowed iPod the moment Northwestern’s Janet Mao faced what would be a match-winning par putt on the 19th hole. The USC coach, who had an earbud in one ear, closed her eyes and said a prayer.

“No matter what happens,” she said, “everything is going to be just fine.”

Gaston’s conversation with God at Rich Harvest Farms went beyond USC’s fate in the semifinal match of the NCAA Championship. It was also about the surgery she would face in two day’s time for uterine cancer.

No one on the team had a clue that for nearly three months Gaston had dealt with the burden of cancer. That she asked her oncologist to postpone surgery until after NCAAs. She wanted to keep it quiet, felt it was best for the team. Her prayer warriors knew the situation. That was enough.

Earlier in the week, however, Gaston shared the news with volunteer assistant coach Jim Gormley, who had battled Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Gormley told her that sometimes it’s good for people to know. Lizette Salas wore purple on the weekends on the LPGA for Gormley in a show of support. Many knew his story.

“You just feel like there’s never a good time to give people that news,” said Gaston.

By the time Gabriella Then’s par putt fell painfully short in the playoff, Gaston knew that she was going to tell her team the news. She wanted them to experience the loss first though, because loss is a part of life and there’s always something to be learned from it.

After Gaston finished a television interview, she huddled her team together at Rich Harvest Farms and delivered the bombshell.

“It was one of the most emotional moments of my life,” said USC senior Victoria Morgan.

A shocked Trojan team understandably broke down in tears.

Gaston took the opportunity to talk about perspective, character and reputation. She talked about the importance of taking care of each other.

It wasn’t lost on Morgan that her coach had put the team first in an extraordinary way.

“To know her diagnosis for as long as she did, and to tough it out by herself and remain the coach that we’ve always had,” said Morgan, “she was so brave to do that for us.”

There were times on the golf course that the highly-competitive Gaston, now in her 21st season at USC, was ready to go home. She wanted to win to be sure, but she’d grown weary from the emotional drain.

Last season Gaston took care of her ailing father, who suffered from dementia, and died last February. It was a trying time in Gaston’s life, and she was eager to catch a break.

And then cancer happened.

During the championship Gaston, a Messianic Jew, often looked down at the ring she bought in Israel not long ago that has Deuteronomy 6:4 inscribed in Hebrew: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”

Gaston, now in her 21st season at USC, doesn’t often wear headphones on the golf course. She feels they keep people from being connected and focused. But this week, this round, she needed the comfort of Christian praise music to help her prepare for whatever comes next.

Gaston led the Trojans to a national record 12th-straight top-5 finish at NCAAs this week. A 2010 WGCA Hall of Fame inductee, she has coached three NCAA Championship teams and recruited five NCAA individual champions. But the outpouring of support she received after Golf Channel reported the news of her cancer during the tournament broadcast delivered a new kind of support from generations of players and coaches throughout the country.

“I just love to coach,” said Gaston. “To try to help people in any way I can. To be real. To be authentic.”

Fight on, coach.