Coming from a 14-year-old, it’s kind of a shocking confession: “I’d rather be on the golf course than with my friends,” says rising golf star Veronica Joels, quickly adding, “I love my friends, obviously, but me and a golf ball on a course — I don’t have anything else going on. It’s just nice and calm.” Ah, calm. The lives of teenagers are rarely calm to begin with, but calm is especially rare for Joels these days amid the growing buzz about her talent on the green. Joels is only a freshman at the Meadows School, but she’s already being courted by more than 25 Division One colleges because of her skills in golf. While most of her classmates probably haven’t even thought about their college plans yet, Joels is busy fielding letters from golf programs around the country. (Her current favorite is Stanford, but she said she hasn’t visited enough yet to choose — and she still has a few years to make that decision.)
But she’s not dawdling in the meantime. Joels is utterly committed to — you might even say obsessed with — golf. After school, she golfs at her home course at TPC Summerlin for about three hours until it’s dark — and then even longer on the weekends. She also teaches clinics for kids and for women on Saturdays. “It’s really fun for me, and it teaches me a lot. It takes me back to fundamentals, so it helps my swing a lot. And it helps me to focus on the basics again.” She learned those basics early. Joels began golfing at the age of 9 and, not long after, started competing in local tournaments. “And that’s when I realized that I could probably go somewhere with this,” Joels says. By age 13, she won the U.S. Kids Teen World Championships in her division. “And that’s when I realized I could probably take this all the way. I could get a scholarship for this.”
What accounts for Joels’ fast rise? Passion? Practice? The strange magic of being a prodigy? To her, it comes down to having the heart for it. “It’s mostly about determination, how bad you want it. … If you want it bad enough, you’re going to try to get it as hard as you can.” Joels certainly wants it. She has won 94 junior tournaments and is sponsored by Titleist and FootJoy. She’s ranked 355 on the Junior Golf Scoreboard, 304 on the Polo Golf rankings and 254 on Golfweek rankings. In her graduating class of 2018, she’s ranked at about 30th in the world.
Her father, Doug, attributes much of her success to her perfect form, which came from being taught solid technique from the beginning. “She just has a really good mechanical swing, and she has outstanding technique. … She hits the ball very long, and being a long hitter is probably her biggest asset,” he says.
There is a downside to her passion. Joels’ high standards for herself means losing is not part of any game plan. “I know I can beat everybody out on the course, but if I don’t play my best and if I don’t count on myself and I focus on the other people too much and I get beat because of that, I hate that. I hate that so much.”