Sometimes life’s biggest curveballs come from the most unexpected places. What started as a painful injury in gymnastics for Paige Spiranac eventually led her to the path to where she is today. But how exactly did she make a switch from flipping through the air to swinging a club and being one of golf’s most recognizable faces today? The answer is as surprising as it is inspiring.
“I was actually a competitive gymnast for most of my life. And then I fractured my kneecap twice. Same one, actually. They told me I was so young that my muscles were stronger than my bones. So while doing a vault, the muscle literally pulled a piece of the bone off my kneecap. I was trying to go to the Olympics, but by the time I was 10 or 11, my parents said, ‘This is too much. You’re in the gym nine hours a day, almost every single day,” she told Aaron Chewning on a recent episode of the St. Andre Golf podcast while taking on the brutal Bethpage Black course.
This sounds awfully painful, but this wasn’t just an injury for Spiranac; it was a turning point. What came next was a quest to find a sport that would challenge her competitive spirit without wrecking her body. Coming from an incredibly athletic family — her mom a professional ballet dancer, dad a national champion football player at Pitt, sister a heptathlete at Stanford, and aunt a pro tennis player — Spiranac was born to compete. She tried tennis first, but it felt too similar to gymnastics and was still tough on her body, and then her dad’s suggestion came in handy.
“My dad said, ‘Let’s try golf’. I didn’t come from a golf family… but after hitting my first ball, I loved it. Obsessed with it, really,” she quipped. That obsession quickly blossomed. Paige Spiranac took to junior golf, breaking into the top 25 rankings, before heading to collegiate golf—first at the University of Arizona and then San Diego State University (SDSU).
It was at SDSU where her golf journey truly took flight. She earned the All-Mountain West Conference honors and led the Aztecs to their first-ever Mountain West Conference Championship in 2015. She even initially planned to become an assistant coach at SDSU after graduation, but fate had other plans. Spiranac did play professionally, but never secured a full card on the LPGA. The mental pressure of the game eventually got to her, and she had to make a choice.
“I felt like a loser and a quitter at the time,” she confessed recently.
