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Every player in the field at last Monday’s NCAA Women’s Championship represented a fallen member of the U.S. military. Before each competitor teed off, the name of the serviceman or servicewoman was announced by the starter as a tribute to their sacrifice.
The name read aloud before Rachel Heck put her tee in the ground at Grayhawk Golf Club was Victoria A. Pinckney, a 27-year-old Air Force captain and a new mother to a 7-month-old boy, who died eight years ago in a crash of a military tanker refueling plane during Operation Enduring Freedom. After Heck played her opening shot, she went back to the starter and asked for the name one more time so she could write it on her scorecard.
During the most important round of her young life, the Stanford freshman wanted to look down and see that name.
Golf is just a game, after all.
“I knew it was going to be a nerve-racking day,” Heck told Global Golf Post after the tournament. “I was afraid I was going to lose sight of what was really important, so having her name there really kept me grounded.”
Her Stanford coach, Anne Walker, thought Heck had gone back to the rules official to get a pin sheet or some other housekeeping item. And then Walker realized what Heck was doing.
“I was just in awe,” Walker said. “When I was walking up the fairway afterwards I thought that may be one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. Her hands were shaking on that tee shot and she was still present enough to have the thought that she wanted to play that day for that person.”
... Heck won six times in nine starts and had a 69.72 stroke average, which is the best season scoring average of all time in NCAA Division I women’s play.
If you want to learn about who this 19-year-old wunderkind is, don’t start with Heck becoming the third player to win an individual NCAA championship, NCAA regional and a conference title in the same season. Don’t solely focus on the fact that in her first semester of college golf, Heck won six times in nine starts and had a 69.72 stroke average, which is the best season scoring average of all time in NCAA Division I women’s play. Her powerhouse Cardinal team was shocked by Arizona in the quarterfinals of match play and watched from home as Ole Miss took home the team title, but Heck of course won her point in the heartbreaking loss.
Try not to stargaze because she just won the Annika Award in runaway fashion, an honor given to the best women’s golfer in Division I. That gets her into the Evian Championship – which would be a big deal if she hadn’t already gone to France in 2018 and made the cut in the Evian as a high school sophomore. A year before that, she made the cut in the U.S. Women’s Open as a 15-year-old. Heck is also headed back to that major this week at Olympic Club, a home game of sorts with Stanford being just south of San Francisco, after medaling in qualifying.
And lastly, don’t become overly enamored with her finishing third this spring, one stroke out of a playoff, in the Augusta National Women’s Amateur.
The issue with focusing on all of those heady accomplishments is that you run the risk of thinking of Heck as merely a talented golfer. She is talented, to put it mildly, but it’s not the most impressive part about her.
Heck, who most golf pundits agree could turn pro at any point she desires, wants to study political science with a focus on international relations at a top-10 university in the country. She also wants to wake up at 4 a.m., as she did the morning after becoming the second Stanford woman to win the Pac-12 Championship as an individual, to go to the campus of San Jose State for Air Force ROTC. When she graduates, Heck’s goal is to play the LPGA Tour while serving in the Air Force Reserve. That might mean getting deployed for a couple of months and missing an occasional major championship, but to her it is worth it.
The fascination with all things military is a recent one. During Heck’s junior year of high school she started dating Sam Killebrew, a student at West Point.
“Being a supportive girlfriend, I started learning all about the Army and the military,” Heck said. “And oh my gosh, I absolutely fell in love with it. I have so much admiration for him and for everyone who serves, the values they live by just felt like something I wanted to incorporate into my own life.”
When Juli Inkster captained the 2019 U.S. Solheim Cup team she invited Nora Tyson – like Heck, a native of Memphis, Tennessee, and the first woman to lead a U.S. Navy ship fleet – to talk to the team. Heck was in the room by virtue of being on the Junior Solheim Cup team and found herself captivated. If Heck was looking for a sign to take the next step, here was another one. Tyson actually came to Grayhawk last week and walked around to see her win the national championship, and the two have developed a bond.
Still, when she came to Walker to discuss the ROTC idea, Heck had no intention of giving an ultimatum.
“She came to me last summer to ask (to join ROTC) and it wasn’t something I was expecting, but she asked in the most humble, polite, respectful way,” Walker said. “She didn’t say, ‘This is what I am going to do.’ It was more like ‘This is what I would like to do, however I respect that you are the captain of the Stanford golf ship and if you tell me I can’t do it, I’m going to be disappointed but I’ll respect that decision.’
“For a young person her age in this generation to be ready to hear ‘no,’ and be OK with that, it’s pretty remarkable by itself.”
The Heck family message is a simple one: Life is long and no one single pursuit defines you as a person. Make golf just one piece of you.
Most in Heck’s inner circle are convinced she won’t leave school early, and her family is a major part of that.
Her older sister, Abby, just graduated from Notre Dame with a 4.0 GPA while also playing on the golf team. She is headed to Washington University, an elite med school, to study oncology. (Said Heck of her sister’s med school application: “I’ve just been a nervous wreck ... I got the call that she got into Wash U. when we were at nationals and I was screaming and telling my whole team. They were so hyped for her.”) Heck credits her as being the biggest supporter of the ROTC move.
Heck’s younger sister, Anna, is also a promising junior golfer. She graduates in two years from St. Agnes Academy, the same school her older sisters attended. Her mother, Stacy, is described as “the most supportive golf mom in the world,” which is a deserving title when you have three daughters playing at a high level. Her father, Robert, played college football and is an orthopedic surgery specialist in Memphis. He got his daughters into golf by providing ice cream as an incentive, but soon their motivation changed to wanting to beat each other.
“Our family atmosphere has always been so positive, and we’ve always been each other’s biggest fans,” Rachel said. “We always wanted each other to play amazing, but we wanted to play just a little bit better than each other.”
The Heck family message is a simple one: Life is long and no one single pursuit defines you as a person. Make golf just one piece of you. A conversation with one of the Heck girls will usually feature a lot of infectious smiling, the occasional, “Oh my gosh,” and an overwhelmingly positive attitude, their grounded approach looking more at the long-term than the short-term.
As with any kid growing up, Heck has seen that philosophy tested. After she made the cut in those major championships as a high school student and was the AJGA’s junior player of the year in 2017, she started to put pressure on herself to be a perfect golfer who demanded winning at every turn. She struggled with a back injury the summer between her sophomore and junior years of high school that required more than an hour of therapy a day.
Heck became frustrated with the game, but she followed her family’s approach. Then she developed her attraction to the military. No one in her family had a connection to it, but Abby knew that Rachel needed the ROTC before anyone else.
“My sisters understand me so much,” Heck said. “We love each other and want the world for each other.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic wiped out her first semester of golf at Stanford, it also allowed Heck to reset and remember why she loves the game in the first place.
That experience has forged one truly special individual.
Before Stanford went out to play Arizona in match-play last week, Walker asked Heck to speak with the team about the importance of not letting poor results get to you. Heck smiled as she always does and with a happy-go-lucky attitude, told her teammates this:
“When I hit a bad shot, I just smile and say, ‘It’s OK, it’s just golf.’ And at first I don’t believe it, but by the time I get to the ball, I do believe it. Wait, it really is just golf.”
Her teammates and coaches were in stitches of laughter, but behind the laughter was admiration.
For the rest of her golf career, Heck will have the undivided attention of the women’s golf community as she did as a high school student. It’s a burden that may sink some teenagers.
Don’t expect it to sink Rachel Heck.
RESULTS: Individual | Team
Top: Rachel Heck with her Stanford Cardinal teammates
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