AJGA Rolex Junior Player of the Year

AJGA Rolex Junior Players of the Year Megha Ganne, Nicholas Dunlap have wise words from the top level of junior golf

A couple of the nation’s top juniors have wise words about setting goals and cherishing the moment.

For the past few years, there’s been one particular end-of-season memory that has stuck with Megha Ganne. It’s the exclamation point on the AJGA competition calendar: the Rolex Tournament of Champions. The co-ed season ender includes a rite of passage for the top male and female junior players in the country. Each gets the floor at the season-ending banquet to give the player-of-the-year speech.

Ganne listened to Yealimi Noh, the now 20-year-old LPGA player with a Solheim Cup appearance under her belt, give it in 2018. Future Stanford teammates Rachel Heck (2017) and Rose Zhang did it (2019, 2020), too. Now the torch is passed to Ganne, who will duck stand-and-deliver duties this year because of lingering COVID-19 regulations forcing the banquet to remain virtual, but the point is the same.

“Honestly they’re all really moving to show how hard they worked over the years,” Ganne said of listening to those speeches.

The Rolex Player of the Year Award has a long, distinguished history of past champions, including Ariya Jutanugarn, Paula Creamer and Inbee Park on the women’s side and Jordan Spieth, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson on the men’s side.

“It’s the biggest honor you can get playing junior golf events and AJGAs,” Ganne said. “It’s a great goal to keep in mind through those winters and practice sessions and to be considered for the award and receive it, it’s the best feeling.”

Megha Ganne reacts to a putt on the sixth hole with her caddie Michael Finn during the third round at the 2021 U.S. Women’s Open at The Olympic Club in San Francisco, California, on Saturday, June 5, 2021. (Photo by Kathryn Riley/USGA)

Ganne, of Holmdel, New Jersey, ended 2021 with appearances on four national teams (the Met Golf Association’s Carey Cup, the Junior Ryder Cup, the Junior Solheim Cup, and as a non-playing alternate on the Curtis Cup), a feat unheard of for a 17-year-old. Then again, Ganne did a lot of things unheard of for a player her age over the past year. Contending at the U.S. Women’s Open in June, where she ultimately finished T-14 (and as the low amateur) is at the top of that list.

One thing still on the bucket list? Win an AJGA invitational – the series of tournaments that feature the organizations’ deepest fields.

“I’m very good at coming in top 3 but not quite winning them,” Ganne joked, referencing top-3 finishes at the AJGA Girls Championship, Rolex Tournament of Champions, and twice at the ANNIKA Invitational, “so I’d like to do that. Hopefully at (the Rolex Tournament of Champions) or maybe I’ll play another one early next year.”

For all Ganne accomplished in 2021, two learning curves stood out specifically. One was to cherish the parts of amateur and junior golf – like the team competitions – where she was able to cultivate friendships. It has her looking forward to a college career at Stanford that will begin in 2022.

The other? Don’t expect to play as well as you can every time you tee it up.

“It’s just really hard to play your best in every single event, even if you feel like you have to because it’s this event or that event,” she said. “You can’t expect yourself to bring your absolute A-game each time and that’s completely normal and something I have to get used to. Because it can be really hard when you want to play well in a certain event and you don’t.”

Nicholas Dunlap knows that battle, too – though he came out on the right side of many of his big goals in 2021. Dunlap set out to win both the U.S. Junior Amateur and the Rolex Player of the Year Award, and he checked both boxes.

“It’s unreal to have my name on a trophy like that, on an award like that,” he said. “It never goes away and that feeling is never going to go away.”

Dunlap, of Huntsville, Alabama, spent a brief amount of time early in the year deciding whether he wanted to begin transitioning to more amateur events or continue to compete in junior events. Setting those specific goals helped convince him to keep teeing it up in junior ones. He felt he needed to learn to win at the first level before moving on to the next.

“I didn’t really feel like I accomplished what I wanted to in junior golf,” he said.

Each tournament week was preparation for winning the U.S. Junior, a grueling week of two rounds of stroke play followed by six rounds of match play if you’re going to cart off a trophy, as Dunlap did. Leading up to that event, he won the Dustin Johnson World Junior and the Polo Golf Association Junior Classic.

Nicholas Dunlap and the trophy after winning during the final match at the 2021 U.S. Junior at The Country Club of North in Village of Pinehurst, N.C. on Saturday, July 24, 2021. (Chris Keane/USGA)

“Every time you win, it doesn’t matter if it’s the club championship or if it’s your little local tournament or if it’s one of the biggest tournaments in the world,” he said. “It helps your confidence because tournament golf is hard. It’s hard to compete and it’s hard to win. So any time something like that happens, it makes you feel good about yourself and gives you a little bit of confidence.”

It would be the ultimate boost of confidence to have his name on both the U.S. Junior and U.S. Amateur trophy at once. He’s already checked the first box, so why not check the second in 2022?

“I think it’s something that not many people can say they’ve done, I, fortunately, have the chance to do that.”

Wise words from the nation’s top juniors.

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Junior golf: Kelly Chinn, Rose Zhang salvaged 2020 and came out with the AJGA’s highest honor

Kelly Chinn and Rose Zhang were named the Rolex Junior Players of the Year by the AJGA. It’s a major award in junior golf.

After Kelly Chinn listened to last year’s Rolex Junior Player of the Year, Maxwell Moldovan, give his acceptance speech at the AJGA’s annual award banquet, Chinn walked out of the room and made a remark to his dad.

“I want to be the one that makes the speech next year,” Chinn remembers saying. “I’m going to do it.”

It won’t be in front of a live audience – a global pandemic has forced this year’s “Greatest Night in Junior Golf” to go virtual – but Chinn will be the one in the spotlight. He accomplished his goal, which wasn’t an easy thing to do considering that golf shut down for months mid-year in the face of COVID.

When Chinn delivers his thoughts, he wants to express, first of all, what a miracle it is that the opportunities presented themselves in the first place – that he got to play as many tournaments as he did.

“Just want them (the AJGA) to know how much it meant to me, how much I worked for it,” he said. “That’s what I’d like to convey.”

Chinn, 17, won the AJGA’s top honor on the strength of victories at the Ping Invitational and last year’s Rolex Tournament of Champions, plus a runner-up at the Junior Players. He goes back to a conversation he had roughly a year and a half ago with Duke assistant coach Bob Heintz. Chinn has committed to play for Duke in 2021.

“He kind of told me that in order to be great, you gotta be somewhat arrogant, which seems kind of different, just by saying that,” Chinn said. He took it to heart, and admits that mental game, more than anything, produced results in 2020.

Chinn’s father Colin retired as an admiral in the U.S. Navy in August 2019. Before that, the Chinn family moved frequently – Hawaii, California, Washington and then to Great Falls, Virginia, where they’ve been based the past four years.

Chinn didn’t mind the moving so much because it allowed him to branch out in his golf. He’s seen a vast aray of course conditions and grasses. Hawaii tops that list. It was where he learned to get comfortable playing in wind.

Despite his ties to the military, Chinn said the service academies didn’t enter his mind in his college recruiting process. His dad’s influence is felt in other ways.

“My dad is one of the hardest workers I know, one of the most disciplined people I know,” Chinn said. “Growing up around him, I really understand that it takes hard work to be great.”

That comes through in the junior-golf grind. Between golf, tournament travel and school, it’s constant. When that let up late-spring, Chinn buckled down on a major swing adjustment. He worked with instructor Daniel Neben at TPC Potomac to get his swing more on plane. That resulted in a consistency boost.

Chinn will play the South Beach International Amateur in Miami to end the year, and hopes to be in the Jones Cup field in early 2021 as he transitions to amateur golf.

Rose Zhang final round of The PING Invitational - 2020 (24) — Rose Zhang during the final round of The PING Invitational – 2020. (AJGA photo)

In women’s golf, Rose Zhang has started that transition in a more rolling way. She won the U.S. Women’s Amateur in August, and finished 11th at the ANA Inspiration, an LPGA major, a month later. She also won the Rolex Junior Player of the Year award for the second year.

Zhang has tried not to focus on the hardware. It doesn’t take a medal to validate the work she’s doing in the game. She checked off several accomplishments in 2020 that would have made any other junior golfer’s bucket list. She has been careful to focus on the short-term.

Zhang checks boxes on a daily basis.

“I see these awards that I really want to earn but I don’t think about it on a daily, it’s more of if I can get my practice done, if I can get my schoolwork done,” she said.

If there was one thing Zhang learned in 2020, it was that there is no such thing as a perfect game. There’s always something to improve.

After she left the ANA Inspiration, Zhang realized she needed more work on her short game, needed to sharpen her irons, hit the fairway more often and gain a little distance. Most importantly, she kept a laser eye on how LPGA players prepare for a tournament and how they still fit in everything – like workouts and practice – even when they’re on the road every week.

“They weren’t hitting as many golf balls, they weren’t even putting as much,” she said of that practice round. “They were more just getting a feel of the course.

“I would be one of the juniors who would practice a little less during practice rounds and it seemed to me that I was practicing more than these pros out here, so it was definitely very different.”

Before she won the Rolex honor, Zhang also was named the Mark H. McCormack medal winner for rising to the top spot in the World Amateur Golf Rankings. The Women’s Am victory and her ANA finish certainly helped get her there, but there were three AJGA invitational titles too.

As for what we didn’t see? Zhang called up memories of multi-tasking.

“Definitely trying to stay on top of schoolwork and coming back from events, I went to school the next day and it was like nothing happened,” she said. “Especially with online classes that were very tough. Coming back and living a normal life and trying to catch up on schoolwork and do whatever I need to do is definitely something I’m very proud of.”

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