Sarah Schmelzel’s story of how she started playing golf is like no other. She now plays professionally, but the sport was not always her strong suit. When she was in fourth grade, her dad took her out of school to watch none other than Annika Sorenstam play golf at their local course, Moon Valley in Phoenix. Sorenstam’s amazing performance that day, that is shooting a historic 59, inspired Schmelzel to start playing golf.

“When I saw her and that competitiveness and how many people were around and how invested the crowd got, it made me completely enamored,” the golfer talked about her experience in an interview with the Epson Tour back in 2017. According to Schezmel, from then on she watched Sorenstam on TV and anytime she was at Moon Valley, she would follow her group. “I fell in love with golf then, and I wanted to play the LPGA since then.” But what was she doing before that?

Well, before picking up the golf clubs, Schmelzel was really into gymnastics and practiced 30-35 hours a week. She was a state champion in middle school but after watching Sorenstam and learning about her amazing legacy, the golfer decided to focus on golf in eighth grade. Sorenstam has won 72 LPGA Tour titles and 10 majors in her career and has played in 37 matches across eight Solheim Cups. From those 37 matches, she earned 24 points. Schmelzel would practice every Saturday at Moon Valley, where she would build sand castles while he practiced bunker shots.

Schmelzel got good at golf and played well in high school at Xavier Prep, where other famous golfers like Cheyenne Woods and Amanda Blumenherst also played. She won the Arizona State High School Championship in 2011. Schmelzel then went to the University of South Carolina to play college golf, where she became an Honorable Mention All-American and ranks fourth in school history in scoring average.

“Being far from home and being thrown into a different type of atmosphere was good for me; I played on a team with a lot of people from out of the country,” she explained. She learned to adapt to new situations and people, which surely helped her now as a pro golfer, but the journey to her participation in the 2024 Solheim Cup has not been easy.

Sarah Schmelzel almost lost her Solheim Cup car

Sarah Schmelzel’s journey to the Solheim Cup was more challenging than expected. After a strong start with four consecutive top-10 finishes, she missed the cut in five of the next six events. The 30-year-old LPGA Tour pro revealed that she was hospitalized before the Chevron Championship due to a ruptured ovarian cyst caused by endometriosis, which is a condition she’s been managing throughout her golf career.

“I continued to try to play through it because I had gotten off to a good start, and I was trying to get Solheim points… I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to get back to a performance state because I started missing cuts, and I didn’t know where the golf ball was going. It was hard to work through,”  explained the golfer. But in the end, everything worked out, and now she is proudly representing Team USA as one of the best rookies. 

The little girl who witnessed Sorenstam create history is now out there to create her own. What a moment! So do you think the golfer can showcase her exceptional skills to win the trophy for her team? Let us know in the comment section below!