The “Stuck at Home With” series profiles players, caddies and staff in the women’s game who are making the most of an unprecedented break in tour life due to the coronavirus pandemic. New stories will be posted every Tuesday and Thursday.
Allie White recently applied online for a job at her local Aldi grocery. It didn’t work out. She’s still waiting to hear back from Seaman’s Cardinal Super Market, though at one point on the application she got tired of writing and put “just google Allie White golf.”
In retrospect, she said, they probably see “pro golfer with a Master’s degree” and think she’s lying anyway. She might try Kroger next.
In case you haven’t figured out yet, White is a character. The Symetra Tour player, known for her tall socks and Ohio Farmer trucker hat, certainly knows how to lighten the mood, something that’s desperately needed in today’s uncertain world.
White, as it turns out, is no stranger to part-time jobs. She lasted seven days at UPS one holiday season, ultimately deciding that a healthy back was too vital to her regular job. She wanted to run packages up to the door, but instead became a truck loader.
“People order the craziest stuff on the internet these days,” she said. “Oh my god is that a kayak? It wasn’t really a kayak, but there were some big things.”
White has also done a fair bit of substitute teaching over the winter breaks. One year while taking over for a teacher on maternity leave, she thought she’d landed a plum gig of health and P.E. classes.
“The first week I was supposed to teach healthy relationships,” she recalled. “All my friends got a huge kick out of that. … Thankfully she stayed pregnant an extra week and I ended up getting straight into teaching a football lesson, which I was much better equipped for.”
White also mowed the greens at her home course, Valley View Golf Club in Lancaster, Ohio.
“I was always taking little chunks out of the fringe,” she said. “The reason they put me outside was because the summer before I’d burnt the hotdogs.”
White worked as a graduate assistant golf coach at Ohio University while she pursued a Master’s degree in journalism. One year, while down in Florida during spring break, the Ohio team spotted Jessica Korda practicing on the range. They begged White to get a picture with her.
“Allie, is that you?” Korda asked as White took the photos.
The team gasped. Korda knew their coach?
“From then on,” said White, “I was legit.”
The Symetra Tour held one event in Winter Haven, Florida, before the coronavirus outbreak shut it down. Right now, the goal is to resume in mid-June. White used to read the New York Times every morning. Now she gets a few nuggets of news from NPR in the mornings while walking her dog, Finley, but mostly tries to keep the headlines to a minimum.
“I turned 30 in February and since then I’m like this is waaay different, 30 is terrible” she joked.
Could she please hit rewind and go back to her 20s?
White alternates between her place in Athens, Ohio, and the family farm in Lancaster, where she helps with the flock of sheep.
The university course where White practices has long been closed but others are open. She tweaked her thumb in January playing football with friends and has taken advantage of the extra time to heal.
White has played six years on the Symetra Tour and had a caddie lined up for every event this season. She planned to try to Monday-qualify at the LPGA event in Hawaii.
She was relieved to find out that the LPGA is offering cash advancements of up to $2,000 for Symetra Tour players and $5,000 for LPGA. These are tough times for many.
A big-picture thinker, White feels gutted for the college players who saw their careers come to an abrupt end. The high school kids who won’t have a prom or graduation.
The LPGA and Symetra Tours, she said, will be there when this is over. White looks forward to getting back on the road. She’s a person who enjoys the process, wherever that takes her.
“I’m always going to be competitive,” said White. “Whether I’m playing pickleball as a 45-year-old or playing on the Symetra Tour or the LPGA. It’s going to be there because I love the actual journey of it.”
Every once in a while, someone will ask White what’s holding her back.
“Holding me back?” she asks.
The thought never crossed her mind.
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