During his freshman year at Claremont McKenna College, Sebi Aliaga had come close to winning.
There were tournaments when he had put himself in position, only to stumble over the final few holes. At other times, victory seemed within reach before slipping away. Each one hurt, but each one left something behind: experience, resilience and, eventually, belief.
That belief finally arrived in May with a Division III individual national championship, which set up ‘the Summer of Sebi’ and a rare NorCal double: victories at both the NCGA Amateur Championship and NCGA Stroke Play Championship. In doing so, he became just the fourth player to win the NCGA’s two biggest crowns in the same year.
Aliaga, 20, had already fallen short a few times that spring with his college team. But when the opportunity came again, something felt different. The national title was the spark.
“I think that unlocked the feeling of winning and the confidence that I could be in that position to win,” he said. “And then it just took off from there.”
The experience changed the way he viewed pressure. The more often he found himself late in tournaments with something to play for, the more comfortable he became.
By the summer, he wasn't simply hoping to contend. He knew he belonged there. That confidence was a long way from where his golf story began.
Growing up the youngest of four brothers in Hillsborough about 15 miles south of San Francisco on the Peninsula, golf had never been Aliaga's first choice. His father had always loved the game and tried to introduce it to his children, but he never forced them to play.
“I thought it was kind of lame,” Aliaga said.
Instead, he played nearly every other sport he could, including football, karate and track and field (high jump). Golf finally grabbed him the during summer of 2022 after his sophomore year of high school, almost by accident. His brother, Casper, and a best friend talked him into playing nine holes at Burlingame Country Club. He shot around 50, but something clicked.
Still, he didn't play in his first tournament, the 2023 San Jose City Championship, until the summer after his junior year. By his senior season, he was taking the game seriously and earned first-team All-West Catholic Athletic League honors. Then came an even bigger decision. After high school, Aliaga took a gap year to focus on golf. The sport he once dismissed as lame was becoming the center of his life.
“This is all I want to be doing,” he remembered thinking. “Just hitting balls, grinding, trying to get better.”
He spent nearly every day at Mariners Point Golf Center, where he worked as a salesman in the pro shop when he wasn’t beating balls.
“A lot of the guys there watched me put in the work and have continued to follow and support my journey,” Aliaga said. “It feels as if they’ve been part of it with me.”
Aliaga’s progress came quickly. By the summer of 2023, he broke par for the first time. His first major test came at the 2023 NCGA Amateur. Aliaga's father encouraged him to try to qualify. Aliaga didn't expect much. He went to Coyote Creek GC’s Valley Course and shot the best round of his life at the time: a bogey-free 3-under 69 and qualified.
“I guess I have to go to Spyglass and I get my teeth kicked in,” he joked.
Indeed, he barely broke 80 either day at the famed course. But he loved every minute of it. The result didn't matter as much as the feeling. In 2024, he made match play at Spyglass and last year he advanced to the semifinals at Poppy Hills before losing to eventual champion Lukas Taggart, who birdied the 17th and won the 18th with a par to close out their match.
“I was so close, yet so far away,” Aliaga said.
The loss stayed with him, but more importantly, he knew he could go farther. That disappointment became motivation.
Then came Claremont McKenna College. Aliaga walked on the golf team at Claremont Mudd Scripps, a joint intercollegiate NCAA Division III athletic program representing Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd College and Scripps College. He followed in the footsteps of two of his older brothers, Auggie and Casper, who had both graduated from CMC. He recognized how much his brothers had grown during their time and wanted the academic challenge as well as the student-athlete balance CMS offered.
Despite not being recruited anywhere, Aliaga showed signs of being a late bloomer – he won the San Francisco City Junior in July before his gap year and the San Jose City Championship the following summer – and wanted to find out how far his golf could go. The answer came slowly, through a freshman season of close calls and the uncomfortable lessons that come from losing when winning feels possible.
By the time the national championship arrived, Aliaga had gained valuable experience in how to handle those moments better. A text from his brother before the final round put him in the right frame of mind. “Have fun on that back nine, that’s what [you] have worked your ass off forever for," his brother Auggie wrote.
Still, the final round tested Aliaga. He was only 1 under at the turn when he finally looked at the leaderboard for the first time. It remained bunched up.
“What the hell?” Aliaga remembered thinking. “Why can't you win it?”
There was no reason he couldn't. Instead of protecting himself from losing, he allowed himself to think about winning. By the time he reached 18, the pressure had reached its peak. Then his CMS coach challenged him as they were walking off the 18th tee box. The same coach who had been there through the failures, walking alongside Aliaga during those final four or five holes when tournaments had slipped away. He knew exactly what Aliaga had been carrying.
“Hey, man, we've been through a lot of hardship,” the coach told him. “It's time to go close out one of these things.”
It was the type of message Aliaga had heard throughout his development. His swing coach, Brady Riggs, had helped him bring the athlete inside him onto the golf course. His Bellarmine Prep coach had helped him develop the mental fortitude to get everything he could out of every round. Now it was time to trust all of it.
This time, Aliaga finished with a 10-foot birdie. This time, he had won. He claimed his first collegiate victory by one stroke over Washington and Lee’s Jonathan McEwen. It also helped get CMS into a playoff for the team title, where he drilled a 20-foot birdie putt to help the Stags secure their second National Title in program history.
All those previous disappointments suddenly had a different meaning. Every missed opportunity had taught him something about pressure. Every difficult final hole had prepared him for the moment when he finally needed to close one out. And just like when Scottie Scheffler finally won for the first time on the PGA Tour, the floodgates have opened for Aliaga.
In the final round of the 46th NCGA Amateur Stroke Play Championship at Poppy Hills in July, the trophy was up for grabs and the back nine turned into a battlefield of small moments. The biggest came on the dogleg-right, par-4 13th, where the tee shot set up perfectly for his trusty fade. Aliaga wedged to roughly 10 feet for birdie. The player leading at the time faced a much longer putt of around 50 feet. He three-putted; Aliaga converted. It was a two-shot swing, and Aliaga knew it was crucial.
At 18, Aliaga nearly reached the par-5 green in two and chipped close. Aliaga faced a short birdie putt—about five feet—for an up-and-down that under normal circumstances would have been routine. These were anything but normal circumstances – his hands shook with anticipation.
“So much that I didn't really know where I was aiming,” Aliaga recalled. “I blacked out and prayed that I started it on a good line.”
Another birdie at the last – this time to edge Reid Buzby and Zachary Hawkins. The birdie on 13 had given him the momentum. The putt on 18 gave him the championship.
In August, Aliaga’s once comfortable 5 up lead at the 123rd NCGA Amateur Championship had been trimmed to 2 up before he canned a clutch 10-footer for par on the 31st hole. He birdied the next and held on to defeat Brasen Briones, 2 and 1, in the 36-hole final. The player who once joked about getting his teeth kicked in at Spyglass had returned to the same course and won the championship, sweeping the NCGA’s two crown jewels and joining Verne Callison, John Lotz and Ben Geyer as the only players to do so in the same season. Along the way to the match play title, Aliaga's teammates, who had sharpened his game in competition, came out to lend support — first a high school teammate caddied for him during the stroke-play qualifying, a current CMS teammate jumped on the bag during the quarterfinal and semifinal matches, and last season's CMS captain cheered him on during the 36-hole finale while his father served as caddie.
The victories have kept coming. He lapped the field at the California Intercollegiate Championship, winning the 54-hole event at Olivas Links in Ventura by 11 strokes in September and added the Blue Streak Invitational at Firestone Country Club’s North Course in Ohio in early October. A player who was overlooked heading into college has been separating himself from the field.
Aliaga’s dream is to play on Sundays — to make a living playing the game he once thought was lame. Because somewhere along the way, golf stopped being something his father wanted him to play and became something Aliaga couldn't imagine his life without.
“It's just a total blessing and I’m super lucky to be able to call this my sport,” he said.