Gonzaga sophomore Alice Kim is coming home for next week’s Dr. Donnis Thompson Invitational, hosted by the University of Hawaii at Kaneohe Klipper Golf Course. The following week, Kim makes her LPGA debut at the Kia Classic, the "unbelievable" bonus she got by winning last week’s UC Irvine Invitational.
"It doesn’t feel like I’m actually going to go and play," Kim said over the phone from Spokane, Wash., where she was hitting balls in 47-degree weather. "It will hit me when I get there because they treat you like God, apparently."
Kim, majoring in sports management with a concentration in fitness, has a strong interest in playing on the LPGA Tour. She is also candid about what it will take to get there.
"I have to think like a pro before that," she said. "It’s been blocking so much of my game. I miss 3-footers and my ego goes so far down. I think I can’t make those anymore."
It didn’t help to watch Hawaii’s Michelle Wie, Ayaka Kaneko and Stephanie Kono find so much frustration last year on the tour. It got so bad, Kim couldn’t watch.
"The news that I would get from other people … they said Steph was not doing well so I was like aaargh, bummer," Kim recalled. "She is a great player from Hawaii and played so well at UCLA. You think what happens and how am I supposed to make it on tour if this great player can’t make it? What’s happening Steph, what’s happening? It was kinda sad."
It is also golf, a game that can get into your head like few others. Kim concedes that has always been her biggest roadblock, along with a fractured wrist following her senior year at University Lab School, interrupting what she believes was the best golf of her life.
"It wasn’t a very delightful period," she recalled.
She was fifth in the state high school championship that year, and one of five Team Hawaii players to sign a letter of intent at the 2010 Asia Pacific Junior Cup. Kim could often get overshadowed by the glut of great players her age, but she was right with them every time they put their bags over their shoulders. The gregarious Kim was also the leader of the pack off the course.
She played in every event as a Gonzaga freshman and had two runner-up finishes, including the Donnis Thompson. At Irvine, she tied the school record with an opening-round 67 and found a way to finish, winning by four shots.
"Before that tournament I was not playing well at all," Kim said. "Really, really bad, almost career bad. I was shooting high 70s and just thought, ‘OK, something is wrong.’ "
A phone call home for swing tips and some overtime by Gonzaga’s Brad Rickel, the WCC Coach of the Year the past two seasons, finally broke through. Kim hit her irons remarkably well in her 67 and finally talked herself into making a few putts.
"Alice just needs to get out of her own way," Rickel said. "She has to have her little extreme moments of concentration. When she gets over the ball, she concentrates hard on what she’s doing and when she’s done she escapes and goes into her aloha spirit, I call it. Getting away from it and not letting her mind grind because her mind does turn fast for a slow game like golf. She is unique."
It took him one swing to realize that. Rickel went to Junior Worlds to watch a prospective recruit, who was playing in the same group with Kim.
"Her first shot on the second tee box at Torrey Pines, she took such a huge lash at it," Rickel recalled. "I thought who is this kid? By the third or fourth hole she was the kid I was watching. She flat-out hits it like she means it."
The Zags have won three of their past four coming into next week’s Rainbow Wahine tournament, and worked their way into the top 50. Five years ago, they were 200th. Rickel has brought in a player or two a year, mostly from warm-weather areas, where they play all year. His players also share another trait.
"We were joking around," Kim said, "that most of the Asians in our school were on our golf team."
Her parents grew up in Korea and she is hoping she will get to speak Korean for the sponsors at the Kia Classic. But mostly she is hoping she can quiet that active mind and enjoy the crowds between those "extreme moments of concentration."
"Alice will be better because she will be enjoying the crowd between shots," Rickel says. "So if she just focuses during her shots she will be fine. It’s a huge hurdle for an amateur golfer to do that. It’s a huge step in her development, I think."
Kim still can’t quite believe it. "Yesterday I was watching the LPGA on TV and I was like wow," she said. "This is an unbelievable thing."
