Former NCAA golf champion Haley Moore is enjoying a dream accomplished right now, but once the LPGA tour resumes later this month, she’ll become a little more fierce.
“It was just a dream of mine to go out there and just go play, and pretty much this first year [in] the LPGA for me is just to go have fun and enjoy the experience,” Moore told Yahoo Sports. “But then [it will be] just try to play really good golf and show how far I can come from when I first started to now.”
The 21-year-old golfer earned her tour card last fall and made her professional debut at the ISPS Handa Vic Open in Australia with a bogey-free 66 on the first day. She missed the cut, but there are plenty of shots left in the season to make up for it.
Moore is used to adversity. She endured teenage bullying from peers in school and parents at tournaments. Then barely into her 20s, she had to find a way to finance her professional career before she could earn her way into the tour.
Moore first hit the driving range at the age of 5 with her father, Tom, a former football player at Ohio State; mother, Michele, a Buckeyes tennis player; and older brother, Tyler. She found early on she had the talent and quickly developed into a star player.
But teenage bullying made her question her place. She was bigger than her peers and could be socially awkward. They gossiped about her, and it didn’t stop when she got to the course with parents accusing her of cheating in some way.
“Through my junior life, I was pretty bummed out and depressed by it,” Moore said. “I didn’t really know if I wanted to continue golf just because I thought I did something wrong. And I was like, maybe I shouldn’t have tried this sport and maybe I just need to take a break and figure out what I need to do.
“Golf was pretty much my life and I just, I wanted to compete and get out there,” she said. “If anything in my life is going not so well, I just know that I can distract [from] it all and go out and play golf.”
Moore kept telling herself the bullies wouldn’t control her lift and she had a dream to follow. So she ignored the remarks and focused on playing in the LPGA, a league she grew up watching.
“It’s hard at first, but really just keep working hard and everything will go your way,” Moore said. “You’ll soon be up there at the top or you’ll soon achieve your dream and they are still doing nothing.”
She graduated high school early and enrolled at the University of Arizona less than two months after she turned 17. Immediately, she earned three top-10 finishes as a freshman and began to grow with the help of kind mentoring from teammates.
“As she started to socialize more with the upperclassmen on the team and really go into her practice regimen and her classes, she just really blossomed into a mature young woman,” Arizona coach Laura Ianello told Yahoo Sports.
“When Haley first got here, she was very dramatic on the golf course and hypersensitive to a lot of things,” Ianello said. “And so that’s one of the biggest things we saw when she was here was her development mentally on the golf course. She really matured that way, keeping herself more composed and in control.”
Moore won the 2018 national championship for Arizona with a composed five-foot putt on the 19th hole as a junior. She reached No. 21 on the amateur list, and during her senior campaign, she finished tied for seventh at the inaugural Augusta National Women’s Amateur.
Moore earned her LPGA Tour card by going through all three stages of Q-School. It’s composed of three long tournaments in three different locations in the United States, which comes at a hefty price.
Shortly after graduating, Moore set up a GoFundMe that’s raised more than $37,000 and helped with toward entry fees (up to $3,000 each), hotel stays, road trips, car rentals, a caddie, and bringing a family member, usually her mom, for support.
