In golf, the opponent who finishes the course with the fewest strokes wins, yet a hole-in-one is particularly rare to witness even amongst professionals. On Saturday, May 2 at the Brookside Golf Course, Poly’s varsity golf team played EF Academy. There, senior Cici Liu did what even professional golfers accomplish only a handful of times: the rare feat of a hole-in-one. For Liu, this happened to be the second in her career thus far.
Beyond her commendable skill as a golfer, Liu excels in her leadership role as the team’s captain. “She makes sure to include everyone. Without her, our team would not be as close as it is,” shared sophomore Beibei Chan.
Liu began playing golf at six years old after her father, an avid enthusiast of the sport, introduced her to it. While golf began as a casual hobby that allowed her to spend quality time with her father, she gradually transitioned to playing more seriously, entering tournaments and training for them. At the peak of her career, Liu trained for three hours every afternoon. She also left town for local and travel tournaments each weekend while simultaneously juggling homework and the other demands of high school. Tournament travel continued throughout the summer, truly making golf a focal point of Liu’s adolescent experience.
Notably, in Liu’s sophomore year, she placed first out of 120 other golfers in the Toyota Toy Cup Q-School, a prestigious tournament hosted by the Southern California Professional Golfers’ Association. Not only was this event memorable, but Liu developed a newfound confidence from it that propelled her golf career forward.
When asked about what she has learned from the sport, Liu emphasized the importance of resilience: “[Golf] is something I’ve been playing for so long, and including now, I’ve been playing for 10 years or so. That idea of never giving up taught me a lot and that translates to everything else I do.”
Years of playing golf gave Liu the fortitude to pick herself up at her lowest moments. Describing the nature of golf, Liu said, “[it is] where everything just goes up and down up and down all the time.”
Regardless of the sport’s unpredictability, it seems Liu does exactly what great athletes across all sports do: control what one can control. Any spectator of Liu’s tournaments will likely find her glove tucked into the back right pants pocket, warming up precisely an hour and a half before the round begins, all to the sound of an Oasis tune.
While Liu’s last season at Poly has now officially come to an end, her athletic skill and leadership on the team will be greatly missed as she graduates Poly and begins a new journey at Carnegie Mellon University.
