Days after her USGA debut, Melanie Walker earned USA Today’s highest honor for a high school athlete.
USA TODAY’s best female high school golfer in the nation was sitting at a gas station when she learned she’d received the highest honor for a high school athlete.
A broken phone had sent Melanie Walker’s family in search of a substitute during a tournament week in Pinehurst, North Carolina, and on the way back, the 17-year-old had USA TODAY’s High School Sports Awards show livestream playing in the car.
“It’s really exciting,” she said. “It feels very impressive to be ranked that high… to be given such a big honor. It’s crazy because you see all how many big names were also on that list and then being chosen above them.”
Indeed, Walker, an incoming senior at Robinson Secondary School in Fairfax County, Virginia, hasn’t finished outside the top 10 in three trips to Virginia’s state high school girls championship. She won the tournament as a junior.
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In Virginia, men and women compete together in high school golf. Consider Walker the impetus behind Walker Robinson Secondary’s recent rise on the state scene. When she was a freshman, the team didn’t get past the first level of districts. Walker decided to do something about it and started organizing winter practices once a week.
“I sent out an email chain,” she said. “I tried to encourage once per week on Tuesday for everybody to come out and practice. We got middle schoolers that came out and did it and they were able to come up this past year. They were some of the reasons we did really well. . . . It really was nice to see the accomplishments pay off because I don’t think I would have gone as far as I did without my team putting in the practice.”
Typically, golf is a fall sport in Virginia but because of COVID-19, it was delayed to the spring last school year. At the height of the pandemic, Walker found it a little difficult to get excited about golf without tournaments to play.
“It was hard to go out and motivate yourself – you could spend a whole lot of time watching Netflix or something,” she said.
But Walker, who lives 20 minutes outside Washington D.C., did note how much easier it was to get from place to place as traffic lightened.
Walker competed on the AJGA throughout the fall of 2020, and in 2021, qualified for two AJGA invitationals – the Annika Invitational (T47) and the Rolex Girls Junior Championship (T45).
By June, she had qualified for her first USGA championship, the U.S. Girls’ Junior, by coming in second at her qualifier at Silver Lake (Ohio) Country Club. Last month at Columbia Country Club in Chevy Chase, Maryland, Walker fired rounds of 74-79 and missed the cut. She took a quadruple bogey on her third-to-last hole after getting stuck in a bush and couldn’t recover.
“It was a good learning experience and two weeks later I won my first AJGA. I learned how to grow from it,” she said of a subsequent trip to the AJGA Stan Utley and Mid-America Youth Golf Foundation Junior Championship.
As she enters her senior year, she has her eye on college golf and is sill talking to coaches. Walker is already thinking about how to build on the USGA foundation she’s now acquired. She’s eyeing what she calls the quadruple threat for 2022, which is what she describes as qualifying for the U.S. Women’s Amateur Four-Ball, U.S. Women’s Open, U.S. Girls’ Junior and U.S. Women’s Amateur.
“Once you get that breakthrough,” she said, referencing this year’s U.S. Girls’ Junior start, “it might be more feasible.”
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