Kelly Shon '14 - From Princeton to the LPGA Tour
5/5/2021
Kelly Shon got her start in golf as a 12-year-old, for a rather simple reason.
“My mother liked to play,” she says. “When she went to play, she didn’t want to get me a babysitter, so I went with her. Eventually she let me play too.”
Had her mother gone for a babysitter instead, would Shon’s story be different? Would she have gone on to become one of Princeton’s most successful professional athletes?
Shon went from a little kid tagging around with her mom to winning the von Kienbusch Award in 2014 to the LPGA tour, where she made the cut at 51 different tournaments. In addition to golf, Princeton has had women’s athletics alums compete professionally in basketball, hockey, soccer, track and field, lacrosse and squash. Professional athletics can be a grind, and in the case of a professional golfer, a lonely grind at that.
“You’re traveling around the world by yourself,” says Shon, who retired from professional golf in 2019 after five years on the tour. “It can be very lonely."
I remember thinking back and feeling so grateful to have been part of the team at Princeton and having that kind of support. I could always reach out to my teammates and coaches.Kelly Shon '14
By eighth grade she could shoot in the 70s and was consistently in the 80s, and she played on the boys’ varsity team at Schreiber High School beginning in eighth grade. She was one of a handful of elite female golfers in her area, and the others had all been playing from a much earlier age.
“I had to catch up to them,” she says. “There were four of them. They’d been playing much longer than I had. I had them to play with, and they gave me something to reach for because of how good they were. They really helped my game and the learning curve.”
When it came time for college, she had her choice of pretty much any major golf powerhouse, which are located mostly in the South and West. She was driven more by the combination of golf and education at Princeton, as well as an intangible feeling she had on her visit.
I fell in love with the campus, I just felt it was meant to be at Princeton. It was too good to turn down.Kelly Shon '14
She would twice be the Ivy League Player of the Year. She’d also be an Ivy League individual champion and an NCAA qualifier, Princeton’s second.
“Most of the chemistry our team had at Princeton was off the course,” she says. “We have a very small team, and we spent a lot of time together. It was such a diverse group of people, with different characteristics and strengths. I felt like I had an outlet within my team for anything that came up. Going through Princeton as a varsity athlete has its challenges. With golf, it’s even more isolating because it’s so small. Having that support meant so much.”
When she earned her tour card, she became Princeton’s first LPGA golfer and just the third in the history of the league. Her first tournament came a few days after graduation. It was a pretty good introduction to the life she was about to live for the next five years.
To earn her card in the first place in 2014, she first had to go through three stages of qualifying. The top 100 from Stage 1 advanced, and she tied for 98th. She then had to finish in the top 80 in Stage 2 and easily did so, finishing 56th. The final weekend she had to be in the top 20, and she finished ninth after playing five rounds.
For Shon, life became a regimented series of tournaments. She’d arrive at the site on Monday and then play nine or 18 holes. Tuesday was a full day of practice. Wednesday was more practice and possibly a Pro-Am.
Then it was time for the actual event, with two rounds Thursday and Friday. If she made the cut, something she did those 51 times, she’d play Saturday and Sunday too. Then it was on the next tournament, with no breaks. This went on from January through November.
“I was known as a ‘range rat,’” she says. “I had to slow it down. It wasn’t sustainable. I thought if it didn’t work out, it wasn’t going to be because I didn’t try hard enough. I wish I’d understood that playing seven days a week every week for a year is not healthy, not for your body or mind.”
Her first top 10 finish came at the 2015 ShopRite Classic outside of Atlantic City, where she finished third, three strokes off the lead. Ironically enough, her finish at that event was better than her finish on the same course as a college sophomore, when she finished seventh there in the Ivy League Championships.
YS Chi, who has been a Princeton trustee and is one of the most loyal members of the Friends of Princeton Golf, was her caddie at the U.S. Open when she made the cut.
“I had so many great experiences,” she says. “It seems silly now to beat myself up about thinking I might not have worked hard enough even though I was actually working too much. That’s walking eight miles a day. It builds up over time. I never felt like I had a vacation in the years I played pro golf. And from a mental standpoint, in golf you have a field of 154 players and you’ll have one winner. Everyone else is losing. There are different variations of losing of course. Did you make the cut? Were you in the top 10? Managing your expectations is such a big deal. It can be very hard to grasp.”
