Stanford Golf star Rose Zhang is ready for her professional debut

Not long before Rose Zhang held a mic on Tuesday, Michelle Wie West remarked with a laugh: Zhang may have logged more weeks as the world’s No. 1 women’s amateur golfer than Wie West spent as an amateur, period.

It was an exaggeration—although Wie West turned pro at age 15 and Zhang held the top spot for more than 140 weeks—but it also wryly underlined that Zhang’s rise to prominence in women’s golf is different from other up-and-coming stars. careers.

In Zhang, who will make her pro debut this week at the Americas Open in Jersey City, NJ, women’s golf gets the rare prodigy who played for an American university. And Zhang’s career, no matter how long it lasts and no matter what wins he racks up, will essentially become a case study of athletic development, long-term planning, and skillful marketing, especially now that college athletes are allowed to make money in ways that were considered off-limits. recently as two years ago.

“I believe that if you can’t conquer one stage, you can’t go to the next and say it’s time for the next step,” 20-year-old Zhang said on Tuesday. “So I wanted to see how I did in college golf, and it turned out well.”

To say the least.

Zhang’s win in April at the Augusta National Women’s Amateur, where she scored a tournament record one day and broke the next, completed her version of the women’s amateur golf career Grand Slam, as she had already won the U.S. Women’s Amateur, the US Girls’ Junior and an individual NCAA title for Stanford.

Another Stanford golfer, Tiger Woods, achieved a similar feat in the 1990s. But this month, Zhang added a second individual championship in NCAA play.

Woods entered Stanford in a very different time for college sports, a time when NCAA athletes were not allowed to sell their autographs or sign endorsement deals. When Woods turned pro in 1996, the sponsorship promptly rained down on him. Zhang’s timeline has moved even faster: Wednesday marks the first anniversary of the announcement that Adidas had signed her.

The economic opportunities in college sports have lately enticed top athletes to pursue degrees and develop their talents while making money and curbing the immediate enticements to turn pro. Those opportunities had less effect on Zhang, who is from Irvine, California, and who chose to attend college before a wave of state laws pressured the NCAA to relax its rules in 2021.

But they could help shape women’s golf in the future, especially if Zhang proves that the American college game is far from an athletic dead end and that pre-prom professionalism isn’t the surest path to fame. For some time now, it often seems that way: Of the women who ranked in the top 10 on Tuesday, only one, Lilia Vu, played NCAA golf (at UCLA).

Zhang, who plans to continue her Stanford studies but is no longer eligible to play NCAA golf, believes her stay on campus has hardly been a waste of time. She said in April that her tenure as a college athlete had been “such an important stage for me” because she craved “figuring out who I really was and my independence”.

She added: “It really allowed me to get my own space and really understand what I’m all about and that allows me to improve my golf game because I realize a profession is a profession But you also have to do something.” working on.”

However, her professional prospects had not been far from mind. She recalled on Tuesday that she had told her Stanford coach from the start that she intended to turn pro, even though her schedule was hazy before that.

In her first season at Stanford, she said, she didn’t think about playing professional golf at all. As her sophomore year progressed, she said, “it felt like it was time for the next phase.”

“I feel that the mindset is also very simple at the moment: try to adapt to life as much as possible and find out what it means to be a professional, which is what I want to do here,” said Zhang , already decorated with the logos of Adidas, Callaway, Delta Air Lines and East West Bank. “I feel like I have a lot of time to experiment with what I want to do, so that’s kind of a mindset I’ve had throughout my career and even moving forward.”

Zhang is entering the professional ranks, while women’s golf has no shortage of elite players. Tokyo Games Olympic gold medalist Nelly Korda routinely lurks around the top of leaderboards. Lydia Ko, who in 2015 became the youngest person to reach the No. 1 ranking in the world in professional golf, remains such a reliable force and brilliant player that she was the LPGA’s money leader in 2022. Minjee Lee has won a major in each of the past two years, and Jin Young Ko returned to the top of the women’s golf rankings this month when she defeated Lee in a playoff at the Founders Cup.

Zhang is arguably the player under the greatest public pressure since Wie West turned pro nearly 20 years ago. (Wie West will be taking a step back from competitive golf after this summer’s US Women’s Open.) Zhang insisted on Tuesday that she didn’t feel particularly vulnerable to expectations, which she tries to take more as a compliment: “They think I have the ability to go beyond and win every time” – then a requirement.

“Growing up my family and the people around me gave me high expectations of what I should be doing as a person, not just as a competitor or golfer, so I kind of fall back on those morals and who I am as an individual “, she said. “That allows me to go out on the golf course and think, okay, today is another round of golf. I’m going to have to do what I have to do on the golf course. If it doesn’t work out, I still have a lot to do in life.’”

After the inaugural Americas Open, which will be contested at Liberty National Golf Club, Zhang is expected to compete in the events that make up the rest of the year’s women’s golf majors circuit. The Women’s PGA Championship is played at Baltusrol in June, followed by the US Women’s Open at Pebble Beach in July, which also hosts the Evian Championship. The Women’s British Open, scheduled for August in Walton Heath, rounds out the majors.

Zhang played in three majors last year, finishing tied for 28th at the Women’s British Open. (She did not compete in the Chevron Championship this year, placing 11th in 2020, but instead played for and won the Pac-12 Conference individual championship.)

She has no short-term expectations for performance, she said. This year it’s all about getting her way – and then letting the world watch to see if her way can work.