BYRON — When Ava Olson’s golf club hit the ground before the ball during a driving-range practice session two years ago, pain shot through her right hand.
Olson, a sophomore at Byron High School at the time, instantly knew something was wrong that day at Hadley Creek Golf Course and Learning Center in Rochester. She didn’t know the extent of the injury, but as the initial jolt of pain eased, Olson went back to swinging her clubs.
“I had chunked the club,” Olson, now a senior who’ll graduate on May 22, said. “I thought I had bruised my hand. I’m guessing that’s when I had broken something.”
That was the start of a journey that cost Olson nearly two full seasons of high school golf — a sport she’d grown to love more than just about anything in her life — but helped her discover a different perspective on life and athletics.
“Before I got injured, I was very determined to go (play) at a college somewhere warm — the teenager’s dream, right? — but after I got hurt I realized there are more opportunities outside of golf,” she said. “That’s all I was doing, playing golf. I had to re-teach myself things like hanging out with friends, going shopping, just being a normal teenager.”
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If there are two things Byron girls golf coach Chad Rolandson learned quickly about Ava Olson during her five seasons on the Bears’ JV and varsity, it’s that she loves the game, and she’s as mentally and physically tough as competitors come.
So when Olson wanted to play through some pain two years ago, her coaches and teammates didn’t think twice.
“She played through two more meets and she played amazing golf,” Rolandson said, “but she kept saying ‘something’s funky, something’s weird. Something’s not right with my wrist.’ They did therapy and taping and everything, and it never got better.”
Then …
“We were playing at The Jewel (in Lake City), a couple of meets after golfing with what I thought was a bruised hand,” Olson said, “and I wasn’t in the bunker, but I was in the rough next to it. It was like hitting into a brick wall. And that’s where it all went wrong.”
When her club hit the ground on that shot, the pain was nearly unbearable. After weeks of playing through it, Olson decided it was time to get her hand examined by a doctor. That visit resulted in Olson spending the rest of the spring and much of the summer of 2024 with a cast covering her right hand, wrist and forearm.
Olson and her medical team thought that would solve the problem, but when the cast came off, the pain and discomfort remained. That led to more clinic visits, X-rays and MRIs, which didn’t show conclusive evidence of an injury.
Olson’s doctors then scheduled an exploratory surgery, which would allow the surgeon to visually determine the cause of the otherwise unexplained symptoms. But, days before the surgery, one final MRI showed that Olson’s tendon had completely torn away from the thumb.
After battling through pain for months, Olson finally had an answer. But it came with a consequence: Surgery to reattach the tendon meant she’d miss her entire junior season of golf. And though she wasn’t swinging a club — she was still able to do some putting — Olson stayed close to the team, attending every practice and meet, and serving as another assistant coach for Rolandson.
“She was great,” Rolandson said. “She stuck with us the whole time.”
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Byron senior Ava Olson practices Wednesday, May 6, 2026, at Hadley Creek Golf Course and Learning Center in Rochester.
Joe Ahlquist / Post Bulletin
Before she became an ace on the golf course, Ava Olson was a soccer player.
In fact, as recently as last fall, she was still around the Byron girls team on a daily basis, as its student manager, a role she held for the past five years.
She played the sport throughout most of her elementary school years, until, as a sixth-grader, she began to have discomfort and pain in her knees. She was diagnosed with discoid meniscus, a congenital knee condition where the meniscus is abnormally thick and disc-shaped, as opposed to the more common C-shaped meniscus. She had two surgeries to have the meniscus shaved down.
“That ended my soccer career,” she said, “but I wanted to still be with the team because it’s more of a family. I really liked the relationship I had with the team.”
Not long after Olson’s soccer playing career ended, she began to frequently join her dad, Andy (an assistant coach for the Bears’ girls golf team) at the course. As an eighth-grader in the spring of 2022, Ava joined the high school program. She stepped into it at a time when Byron had some of its best teams and players — Calie Dockter, Rylee Finney, Natalie Appel — in program history.
“That summer, she had put a lot of time in at the course with her dad and she came back as a freshman and her swing had really improved,” Rolandson recalled. “I remember standing on the driving range at the old Links of Byron course and asking her mom, ‘Do you think she’s mentally ready to handle varsity golf?’ And she said, ‘I think so,’ so I just started walking with Ava a lot as a freshman. She had a decent season and I talked to her about things to work on over the summer, and her dad kept telling me that she was addicted to being at the course.”
That addiction has largely remained, despite losing most or all of her sophomore and junior seasons to injuries.
“She’s such a great kid, fun kid,” Rolandson said. “She makes practices every day a blast, and her body of work speaks for itself.”
Olson also “rerouted myself” during those months when she couldn’t swing a club, when her home simulator sat relatively quiet and when her biggest impact for her team came while offering advice at practices and meets, rather than being able to contribute on the scorecard.
Rather than pursuing college golf, she plans to enroll in a radiology program through Mayo Clinic and Rochester Community and Technical College, and she hopes to stay close to home and work in the radiology field at Mayo Clinic when her schooling is done in approximately two years.
Golf will continue to be a big part of her, life, too. And now, when she swings, she still winces sometimes — perhaps she always will — but the pain isn’t there. She has mostly surpassed the mental hurdle of recovering from her injury and surgery. It’s shown in her scores, too. She has held down the No. 1 spot in Byron’s lineup this season, and shot a season-best 78 on April 29 at The Jewel — the place where, as she puts it, “it all went wrong” two years ago .
Being back on the course as a senior has been a boost to Olson’s spirits, and she hopes her season and high school career don’t end until June 10, in the final round of the Class 2A state tournament at The Ridges at Sand Creek, in Jordan.
“When I got hurt, it was kind of like the end of the world for me,” Olson said. “Being able to play this year is like my biggest dream come true. I’m so excited to be back out golfing. It’s been one of the only things I’ve looked forward to for the last four years of my life.”
Byron senior Ava Olson practices Wednesday, May 6, 2026, at Hadley Creek Golf Course and Learning Center in Rochester.
Joe Ahlquist / Post Bulletin