“I want to start with a story about something illegal,” wrote Rose Zhang, ’25, in August. “It’s one of my favorite memories.” She was writing for the Players’ Tribune from Paris, on the eve of her Olympic debut. That “something illegal” was her introduction to the sport that got her there.
When Zhang was 9, her dad began driving her out to bare plots of private land recently cleared for construction near their home in Irvine, Calif. “I just grabbed a mat, put it down, and started hitting golf balls,” Zhang told Stanford. Over and over, she would send them into the sunset, past hundreds of yards of gravelly dirt. Finding the sweet spot on the face of the club and watching a ball soar, “it just becomes addicting,” she says. “I wanted to get that feeling again.” When she ran out of golf balls, she and her dad would drive around to retrieve what they could, then go back to the lot to do it again.
Image: Seth Wenig/Associated Press
Those illicit dirt-patch sessions were the starter fuel for a nascent yet already record-breaking career. Beginning in 2020, Zhang spent 141 weeks as the No. 1 amateur in the world, the longest of any player in history. She broke Tiger Woods’s [’98] Stanford record for tournament titles as a sophomore. And in May 2023, she became the first female golfer to win back-to-back NCAA individual titles. “She had won everything there was to win. She’d done it in lightning fashion,” says Stanford head coach Anne Walker. In the two weeks that followed, Zhang turned pro—and became the first woman in more than 70 years to win while making her professional debut on the LPGA tour.
Midway through her second year on the tour, Zhang, who is ranked ninth in the world, is still exploring who she is outside the sport. During some of her teenage years, “golf was very much a whole identity of mine, and I was not that satisfied about it,” she says. Attending Stanford was itself a statement—she could have turned pro after high school, but she was adamant that she attend college. She’s since made the unconventional choice to continue her studies, a decision that takes her away from professional golf each winter quarter. Beyond a life in golf, “I wanted something more. I wanted to figure out what that was,” she says. To do that, she’s keeping her eye on the long game.
Teeing Up
When Zhang was growing up, no one in her family played golf—it was too expensive—but a family friend desperate for a playing partner gifted her dad, Henry, a set of clubs, and she tagged along to their practices and borrowed the 7-iron, “this huge club for tiny me,” she says. About two months after she first picked up a club, Zhang entered a golf tournament and won second place. At the next tournament a few weeks later, she won first.
She not only had a natural swing—she was also fiercely competitive. In the pool. During family game nights. On any court. “I played basketball with her when she was maybe 11, 12,” says her brother, Bill, who is 10 years older. “She would foul me. She made basketball like the [Ultimate Fighting Championship].”
She’d put sticky notes in her Bible with requests like ‘Oh God, please give me two birdies and one bogie tomorrow. I’ll be very satisfied. Please and thank you.’
When she was 11, a friend’s parent approached coach George Pinnell, who ran a training facility in Los Angeles County. Pinnell was known not only for training great golfers but also for taking students with promise even if they couldn’t afford the lesson fees. Every week, her father drove her 30 miles to Pinnell’s facility for a two-hour lesson. Already she’d begun practicing four or more hours every day.
Zhang came from a Christian family, but over time, even church took a backseat to golf—Sundays were for practice and tournaments. Still, she’d put sticky notes in her Bible, with requests like “Oh God, please give me two birdies and one bogie tomorrow. I’ll be very satisfied. Please and thank you.”
Zhang’s dad was a fixture at every practice and every game. At tournaments, “he cheered on everyone else so hard,” says Rachel Heck, ’24, who played against Zhang as a teen and later became her Stanford teammate. “He’d be like, ‘Come on, Rachel, you got this!’ ” But whenever Zhang was up, he’d watch silently. “Rose would make a birdie, and it was just, like, nothing.”
There were no hugs or high-fives after games either. Instead, there were questions: Why’d you hit it long on that shot? Why did you use the wrong club? “Growing up, I never felt like he was satisfied,” Zhang says. “He pushed me past my limits when I was younger and even going into college. I wanted to show him that I was made of something and I could do it.” In some ways, his critiques eased her mind on the course. “He was the one that pointed out the mistakes for me, so I’m like, ‘Dude, Dad, chill.’ ”
Heck and Zhang. (Image: Brandon Vallance/ISI Photos)
At tournaments, she walked like she was out for a casual game with friends. Getting riled up didn’t make sense to her in a game of the unexpected, where one bad swing could wipe out a lead and players could make up ground with career-defining streaks. “The key to playing well was staying consistent, and that was exactly my asset,” Zhang says. “I never once thought, I have to win this. I have to become world number one. It was more that every single day I had this routine to get better and I just executed it. I executed it better than other people because I was focused on the process.”
Driven
Walker still remembers the first swing she ever watched Zhang take, at a tournament in Florida. “We always laughed about it—she remembers it too,” Walker says. Zhang, then 14, was using a 5-wood on the ninth hole and snap-hooked it by accident, sending the ball veering off to the side of its target. “It was so bad,” Walker says. She left unimpressed by Zhang, who was sure she’d lost her chance to play for the Card. “Rose likes a good challenge,” says Walker. “I almost think, secretly, that was part of the reason that she set her sights on Stanford.”
By her sophomore year in high school, Zhang had an offer from Walker, as well as the head coaches at USC and UCLA. “A lot of people doubted it,” Zhang says of her desire to go to college. Her parents and Pinnell were supportive, but almost everyone else around her—her dad’s friends, her golf community—warned her that attending college would mean throwing her professional career away.
“I didn’t care,” says Zhang. “I didn’t know what I wanted to study, but I just wanted to be in that environment, because it was a stage in life that a lot of people talk about, and I wanted to experience it.”
Zhang entered Stanford in 2021 and instantly gained a support system in her team, her old friend Heck included. “It’s a lonely sport, which makes having people going through it with you one million times better,” Heck says. The 10 women did everything together—eating, going to parties, sitting in a circle laughing on someone’s living room floor. In that environment, Zhang is giggly, goofy, and clumsy, Heck says. “She’ll trip on a flat surface.”
But not even the coaches beat Zhang to the course in the mornings. “What fills her tank is the journey,” Walker says, “the thriving on how hard she had to work, and feeling like she might have worked harder than her competitors.” Heck once woke up early to help a fellow teammate prepare for the time change of an upcoming international tournament. They were killing time at the empty golf course when, at 7 a.m., Zhang walked in. “We were like, whoa,” says Heck. “We just witnessed something that no one else ever witnessed, which is Rose Zhang arriving to practice.” She’d be there when the coaching staff left, too.
La Vie en Rose
As Zhang navigated her first year at Stanford, her urge to expand beyond her identity as a golfer grew. “I just wanted something bigger than myself—bigger than the little world that I’m in.” She started doing Bible studies with friends in her dorm, began going to church again, and joined a student community Christian group on campus. During a visit back to Irvine that year, she was baptized.
Her faith gave her added purpose on the golf course as well—she felt as though she were playing for something greater than herself. “Obviously, you’re gutted [when you miss a putt], but there’s always the light outside of the dark tunnel, and you can always see it,” Zhang says. At the same time, it was as though the notes she placed in her childhood Bible had come to fruition. “I felt like there were specific moments in time where there was something working in my favor,” she says—intuition, or a sense of calm, or a burst of power.
Rose Zhang was coming into her own. During her sophomore year, at the 2023 Augusta National Women’s Amateur, she asked her dad to caddie her game, as he had at several other high-profile tournaments. “He’s been with her virtually all the time,” Pinnell says. “Without Henry, I don’t believe she could have gotten where she is.” Where she was on the final day at Augusta, though, was in a tense spot. On the 15th hole, Zhang had a two-stroke lead over the next competitor—no room for error. Then, a rare sight: Zhang and her dad in a heated discussion. She seemed to make a decision, then got in position and hit the ball. Almost instantly she slapped her thigh. She’d made contact too low on the club and sent the ball into the water. At the press conference after the game, she took full responsibility for the shot, saying she “felt confident, for the most part” in the decision to go for the green and “just hit it thin.” Months later, however, she told the Athletic, “That shot, that was my dad, I’m not even gonna lie.” It wasn’t his fault for suggesting the shot, she said—it was her fault for going against her instincts. It looked like a fatal error at the time, but her opponent struggled in their sudden-death playoff, and Zhang ultimately won the tournament.
“When she was younger, she’d listen to Dad all the time,” Pinnell says. (Her father does not give media interviews.) Henry was neither a professional golfer nor a coach, but he was smart on the course, and, more than anything else, says Pinnell, he knew how his daughter’s mind worked. He helped instill in her the belief that she could be a champion and the discipline to be the best version of herself every time she picked up a club. Now the best version of herself, she realized, meant trusting herself.
Henry and Rose Zhang at the Cognizant Founders Cup. (Image: Seth Wenig/Associated Press)
Henry was neither a professional golfer nor a coach, but he was smart on the course, and, more than anything else, says Pinnell, he knew how his daughter’s mind worked.
Though Zhang was intent on experiencing college, with every win, reality crept in: She was too good for collegiate golf. It’s not unusual for college golfers to win zero or one out of every 10 games. Her sophomore year, Zhang won eight out of 10. “You look at her college golf résumé—there was nothing left,” Walker says.
But the decision to join the tour was not easy in Zhang’s mind. “I was so scared to turn professional,” she says. “Scared of the burnout factor. Scared of what’s going to happen if I don’t want to play the sport anymore. Scared about the need to achieve things.” Beyond the game, the thought of leaving Stanford devastated her.
But she needed to seize the moment. “The body starts to break down over time,” says Walker. “She was at her peak.”
Zhang found her way forward after talking with Michelle Wie West, ’11. Wie West turned pro before setting foot on the Farm, and she told Zhang how she had attended classes at Stanford for half the year and had taken time off to play on the professional circuit the rest of the year, graduating with a degree in communication in five years.
It was a moment of clarity for Zhang. The choice wasn’t binary. “If she did it, why can I not do it?” Zhang asked herself. So she made a plan. Going forward, she would register for 20 academic units each winter quarter, cramming in as much coursework as possible, then she’d take the next three quarters off to train and play in pro tournaments around the world. She expects to graduate about three years from now.
Whole in One
Zhang debuted as a professional at the 2023 Mizuho Americas Open, in Jersey City, N.J., and sparked a media frenzy when she won the tournament. “I can’t even begin to tell you how crazy it is that she did that,” says Walker.
“People spend their entire careers out on the LPGA and never win,” says Mollie Marcoux Samaan, commissioner of the LPGA. “Not since Beverly Hansen in 1951 has a player come out and won on the LPGA tour in her very first start.”
Zhang raced back to Stanford for a stats final immediately after her win. Once spring quarter was tied up, she transitioned fully to the pro circuit. Even for someone who had played elite golf for more than a decade, the tour was intense. “I’d never realized how much golf you would be playing as a professional,” she says.
With school on hold until January, her schedule took on a new, grueling shape. Typically, Mondays were for a long flight to a new golf course. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays came practice rounds, pro-ams, and media obligations. “And then Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, you’re playing 18 holes,” she says. She squeezed physical therapy, workouts, and meals into downtime. On Sunday nights, worn out, she got ready to do it all again.
Although she is unflappable on the course— Zhang has an uncanny ability to block out everything but the small, white ball in front of her—the sleep deprivation and hurried meals began to take their toll. The stress of her relentless schedule exacerbated stomach discomfort she’d been dealing with since her freshman year. “Media was latched onto me, and it was great,” she says. “I wanted to give as much to them as I could, until it was hard to.”
Returning to Stanford for winter quarter this past year felt like a reprieve. “It’s such a simple schedule. You’re always on campus,” says Zhang. She loves being a student—no one cares that she’s a golf prodigy when she’s taking notes in class or studying in the library. “Even if you are in the trenches, doing p-sets, grinding, everyone’s in the same boat, processing it together, which is much different from when you’re out on tour.”
Zhang practices at the Stanford Golf Course while in school, but less often. She says she’s learning to silence that part of herself that says she’s worthless if she isn’t grinding: “I’ve learned to properly rest.”
The time away from professional golf didn’t hurt her game. She returned to the tour in the spring and, in May, won her second LPGA tournament at the Cognizant Founders Cup. When she tapped the ball into the final hole, her father, as always, was on the sidelines. Except this time, he pumped his fist and hugged the people beside him. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him this happy,” Zhang said during the press conference afterward, a huge smile on her face. “Both him and I grew a lot, together, this past year.”
Her brother, Bill, concurs. Their dad, who grew up in a poor family in rural China, has “changed a lot this past year,” he says. “You have to understand that he came from nothing.” Zhang’s success led to sponsorship deals with Delta Airlines, Callaway Golf, and Adidas. Navigating the sudden wealth and fame was rocky at first, but Zhang’s parents have settled into it, says Bill. “It’s a validation of their efforts.”
By August, Zhang had competed in 13 events during the 2024 tour, placing in the top 10 four times. (Tournaments typically start with 120 to 144 players, with about half making the cut to earn money—anywhere from a few thousand dollars to a million or more for the winner.) “For women’s golf to grow, we need superstars, and Rose is a superstar,” says Marcoux Samaan. “I think she has the ability to help elevate not just herself but the LPGA tour.” At the Olympic Games in August, she tied for eighth.
“The last two years feel like a bit of [a] blur, sometimes,” Zhang wrote from Paris. “I will always be that little girl hitting balls into the desert, but the person I am now is so much more than that, too. And I can’t wait for you all to meet her.”
Kali Shiloh is a staff writer at Stanford. Email her at kshiloh@stanford.edu.
