Sixty percent of new golfers in this country in the past two years have been women. It’s a genuinely remarkable stat, but the more I dug into this issue, the clearer it became that it isn’t the whole story. The real story is the sheer amount of work sitting underneath it, most of it done quietly, by women who had to have it coaxed out of them before they’d take any credit for it at all.
Sarah Chia becomes the first woman to captain Royal Adelaide in its 134-year history this issue. She’ll tell you the privilege is the role, not the fact she’s first, but that answer undersells what actually got her there: 22 years as a corporate lawyer and a decade on Golf Australia’s board steering the game through genuine structural change. That’s more than a decade of deliberate, often unglamorous work, done well before anyone thought to put her name on a captaincy.
Sophie Edwards built her way to general manager at Secret Harbour Golf Links the same way, department by department, years of learning every corner of the club from the inside. “I never planned on becoming GM,” she says. She also never stopped building towards it.
Caitlin Peirce and Justice Bosio are doing the same thing, just earlier in their careers. Two Karrie Webb Scholarships and a career-best run at the US Women’s Amateur for Caitlin, a runner-up finish and a career-best week for Justice, both preceded by a Q-School week each still calls the hardest of their careers. Ask either what the next step would mean and neither reaches for anything grand. In true Aussie spirit, “I guess I’m just seeing how it goes,” Caitlin laughs.
It’s there at the grassroots too. A remote club in Arnhem Land now has 14 percent of its entire town enrolled in junior golf, built by a handful of volunteers and a community of mums who started showing up alongside their kids. There’s Karen, who found her way back to health and to golf after a doctor’s blunt warning and gathered a whole crew of girlfriends around it before finding her way to GirlsTrek through her friend Melinda.
Even at the top of the sport, the same pattern holds. Lydia Ko’s career has been built on relentless perfectionism and she’s just as deliberate about lifting Jeeno Thitikul and the players chasing her records, understanding that her own legacy is tied to how strong the field around her becomes.
Every woman in this issue built something real, a career, a club, a community, a standard, long before the participation numbers caught up to prove it was working. If 60 percent of new golfers in this country are women, it’s worth remembering how much quiet work made that possible.
