After that tournament, with solid determination, I told my dad that I would never let that happen again. I then worked the rest of the summer on my game and got to where I could break ninety. However, when school started back, I forgot all about golf and went back to playing volleyball and running track. The same summer trend of learning the game and forgetting about it during the school year, kept on until I got to high school where I could be on a team and practice everyday.
For the first two years of high school, I still ran track and played volleyball, I was in the band, and I played golf. By the time my junior year rolled around, my parents helped me realize that by playing all these different sports and not focusing on any particular one, I was always going to be good at one and mediocre at the rest.
With that said, I chose golf because, realistically, I knew I had the most potential talent at it. My senior year of high school, our golf team made it to the State Tournament in Austin, Texas for the first time in the school's history. Our team ending up finishing seventh out of the top eight schools in the state which brought a lot of excitement to our school's golf program.
That tournament helped me get a little bit of exposure to the college coaches, but most of my exposure came from how well I did in tournaments during my junior summer. I played in two AJGA tournaments in my junior year and one in my senior summer. In each of these AJGA tournaments, I finished as low as 6th and never higher than 11th. From there on, I got flooded with recruiting letters.
Somehow despite having the opportunity to play for some big Division I schools, I chose Texas State because I thought it would be a good fit for me as a player and as a student.
Academically, Texas State turned out to be a great fit. I made the Dean's list the first semester with a 3.8 GPA. From a golf standpoint, I had a little bit harder time. I missed qualifying for a lot of tournaments that I thought I had a pretty good shot at and I had trouble fitting in with my teammates.
Finally, when the Southland Conference Tournament rolled around in April 2004, my dry-streak ended. I qualified, among my nine other teammates, to play the number five spot in the tournament. The excitement was overwhelming because I had tried for what seemed like an eternity to get a chance at tournament exposure.
The first day of the tournament, I tied our number one girl for the low round on our team. The second day, I beat our number one by one stroke and played in the number two spot the last day. That day, our number one girl shot a one-under-par seventy-one to finish in third place overall. I, on the other hand, caught a case of nerves and shot eighty-three the last day. I finished in a tie for twelfth place. However, I did earn Honorable Mention All-Southland Conference recognition.
After that tournament, I felt some of the pressure relieve itself from my body and suddenly, things seemed to be looking up for me. I've had a great tournament summer the past couple of months and now I'm back on the team fighting for a chance to play in all the fall 2004 tournaments.
That was a quick summary of how I got started and where I am now. From here on, I just know that I want to finish out my college golf career with impressive numbers and graduate with a nice GPA. If the opportunity to try to play on the LPGA tour or go out and try to make it on the Futures Tour arises, then I would take it with arms wide open.
However, if those dreams don't work out, I'm majoring in Business- Marketing and hoping to find a future in Sports Marketing. I figured if I could grab a job working for Nike or Titleist, I'd still be doing something with my golf talent, just in a different way.
Essentially, if I don't make it to the big leagues in golf, I would rather pick a career in which I could still be connected to golf some kind of way.
