Island life was everything for Emily Odwin. She was at the beach daily while growing up in Barbados and activities were centered around the ocean, where she learned to swim when she was only 4. It was her happy place to relax as well.
Growing up in the parish of St. James, Odwin became a long-distance open water swimmer but loved all sports, trying almost everything except cricket, which along with track and field are the most popular sports in her home country. She also earned a brown belt in karate.
Taking up golf was unlikely because there are only six courses on an island smaller than any U.S. state. But Odwin loved watching Tiger Woods and Jordan Spieth play golf, which was must-see TV for her and her dad, Edward. She took up the sport without any Barbadian golfers to idolize.
Fast forward a decade and Odwin will make history when she tees it up this week in the U.S. Women’s Open. She emerged from final qualifying to play in the major at Erin Hills in Wisconsin that begins on Thursday and becomes the first golfer—male or female—in Barbados history to play in a U.S. Open. She is believed to be the first Barbadian to play in any golf major as well.
“I just want to show kids back home that golf is a real possibility,” she told Golf Digest. “You never know where the game might take you.”
The 21-year-old Odwin, a junior at SMU who started her college career at Texas, will play in a professional event as an amateur for the first time and will show off a powerful game, especially off the tee, where she hits the ball longer than other by 20 to 30 yards.
“She’s big and athletic,” said Carly Ludwig, an SMU assistant coach who will caddie for Odwin at Erin Hills. “The way the game is going from a pure numbers standpoint, hitting the ball a long way off the tee helps tremendously; you can put wedges in your hand more often than not. If I’ve got the facilities, I can help you with your short game. I can’t always teach you how to hit it farther. Bryson [DeChambeau] may have debunked that theory. On the women’s side it’s still hard to do.”
Odwin has so much shot-making skill, Ludwig noted, that she still carries a 3-iron in her bag when fairway woods and rescue clubs are all the rage.
“She can hit a punch 3-iron that’s freaking awesome off the tee,” Ludwig said. “She can hit some higher 3-irons. She can work the ball really, really well. She has to worry about spin a lot more than other people do. There’s a lot of things that go into her game that she’s had to learn and think about. She swings so smooth and so well, you don’t want to take that away from her.”
Odwin had to travel outside the island, mostly to the U.S., for tournaments. She was the first Barbadian to qualify for the U.S. Women’s Amateur and U.S. Girls’ Junior in the same year in 2021. Barbadians can now see her living out her dream.
“I think it’s important because I grew up playing a lot of different sports,” Odwin said. “Some of those I stopped playing because I didn’t know if there was a future for me in that sport. I think it’s important to show people that this is something we can do. Golf is an avenue we can take and that we can be successful at if we work hard enough.”
Odwin is proud of her culture and plans to wear an embroidered Barbados flag on her polo shirt at Erin Hills. For Odwin, it’s a subtle but powerful reminder of where her journey began.
She started playing at Royal Westmoreland Golf Club and then split time between there and a better course for junior players, Barbados Golf Club, where she met Denny Foster. He started working with her when she was 11 and is still her coach.
A young Emily Odwin hits a shot while playing in her native Barbados. (Photo courtesy of Emily Odwin)
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“At the time, if Barbados had 25 junior golfers, they had a lot,” Foster said. “There are [six golf courses]. Only one golf course is truly affordable and truly public. That’s the background of this young girl. There weren’t hugely structure programs with thousands of kids and opportunities. It’s unbelievable what she has achieved.”
Foster will be with Odwin in Wisconsin and traveled with her to dozens of tournaments when she was a junior. He cried when he learned she qualified for the U.S. Women’s Open, tying for co-medalist honors at The Olympic Club in San Francisco, where the third and last qualifier was Stanford star Paula Martin Sampedro.
“She always had the ambition to play on the LPGA Tour,” Foster said. “I teach a lot of kids who have those ambitions. She was very different in that regard and very focused on that, even at a very young age. She never strayed from that goal. She gave up all of her other sports.”
Odwin has been lucky enough to have a big group of supporters. For junior and amateur tournaments, her parents, Edward and Orna, and coaches traveled with her, and she had sponsors help with the costs, all organized by an unofficial group called “Team Emily.”
“We put a team together that made it happen, getting competitive exposure,” Foster said. “She carried everyone along with her on the journey. Make sure she got enough exposure that NCAA coaches would recognize her talent. That was a lot of teamwork. It’s Emily’s team, her parents, myself; the Barbados Golf Association at that time put in money and the Barbados Olympic Association got on board. Then there were the friends of Emily. Everyone was just interested to see a young kid chase a dream. All put together, we formed kind of a syndicate to make sure that happened.”
Odwin grew up 10 minutes from the ocean, and there was rarely a day she wasn’t there. She carries that easy-breezy vibe with her so much that her SMU teammates and coaches call her “Barb.” Certainly not short for Barbie, but for Barbados.
“A lot of times I just swim,” Odwin said. “But a lot of times, I just like to just kind of relax because it’s so peaceful out there. And if you find the right beach, it can be really quiet, too. It can just be kind of you and the sea. I love the water. It’s very calming.”
When she returns home, she usually practices in the morning, goes straight from the golf course to the beach, and then returns to the course to work with her coach.
At the 36-hole U.S. Women’s Open qualifier, Odwin used a local caddie and didn’t know exactly where she was on the leaderboard in the marathon day. Her opening 18-hole score of 68 was the best in the field, and during the break before the second round she called her college coaches just to see what they were up to. When Odwin shot 71 in the afternoon to tie Florida teenager and recent U.S. Women’s Amateur Four-Ball winner Sarah Lim for first, she called to say she would need a caddie for Erin Hills.
“It took a while to sink in,” Odwin said. “I remember looking at my caddie and being like, ‘Did we just do that? No way.’ It’s really exciting. It’s everything you work for.”
Ludwig looks forward to being on Odwin’s bag because she already knows what Odwin’s disposition will be like, for good holes or challenging stretches.
“She’s got a nice, easy walk. It doesn’t look like anything other than she’s strolling the beach in the middle of Barbados,” Ludwig said. “I think that’s a cool demeanor to have, especially in the sport we play.”
Outside the ropes, Odwin might even have a cheesehead in her gallery, too.
“I’ve never been to Wisconsin,” she said. “I’ve heard they’re big on cheese. I love Brie, so I’m looking forward to that. One of my coaches even joked about wearing a cheese hat in my gallery!”
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
