Rose Zhang will keep her eyes primarily on golf now that her Stanford studies are behind her.
matthew huang, icon sportswire via getty images
PHOENIX, ARIZONA | Nearly two weeks ago, the night before the opening round of the LPGA’s Fortinet Founders Cup, Rose Zhang finished her final assignment at Stanford University: a 15-page paper on brewing beer.
Although Zhang, 22, won’t walk in the graduation ceremony until June, she’s finally done with school. But instead of taking time to celebrate the accomplishment, Zhang jumped right back into professional golf, playing tournaments the past two weeks.
“There’s been no time to celebrate and honestly I’ve been pretty locked in to golf,” Zhang said. “The tour is just getting more and more competitive and I feel like I’m sort of playing catch-up now. So I really feel like this year is about grinding.”
Zhang has found success in many aspects of her life. She won the 2020 U.S. Women’s Amateur, the 2023 Augusta National Women’s Amateur and a pair of NCAA individual titles (2022, ’23). After turning pro in May 2023 following her sophomore season at Stanford, she became the first player to win in her LPGA debut since 1951 when she captured the Mizuho Americas Open. She won a second LPGA title in 2024 and has played on the last two U.S. Solheim Cup teams. And soon, she’ll be a college graduate.
“I do think that this year will be the first full year where I claim myself as ‘Rose the golfer.’ This will be the first full year where I am on the LPGA and I’m solely focused on doing that. It could be good, it could be bad, but I know that I’ll put my all in so I think I can be satisfied with that.”
Rose Zhang
Despite having competed for almost three years as a professional, Zhang says she almost feels like a rookie again. With her studies complete, she can focus strictly on her game.
“I do think that this year will be the first full year where I claim myself as ‘Rose the golfer,’” Zhang said. “This will be the first full year where I am on the LPGA and I’m solely focused on doing that. It could be good, it could be bad, but I know that I’ll put my all in so I think I can be satisfied with that.”
Finishing her degree in communications is the culmination of a commitment she made to herself.
“The hardest part was putting my body through classes 60 hours a week while needing to do sponsor obligations, needing to be a professional and needing to actually play golf,” Zhang said.“While I am really grateful I was able to do these things, it did take a toll on how much energy I spent every single day either at school or on the golf course.”
In 2024, Zhang followed her rookie splash with a solid sophomore campaign. She made the cut in 16 of 21 starts and posted five top-10s, including a victory at the Cognizant Founders Cup. But toward the end of the season, a left-wrist injury that had plagued her since high school started acting up again.
“I feel like 2024 was when I reached a lot of new heights in the game but I also didn’t do anything to maintain or repair myself,” Zhang said.
After the season, Zhang took time off from the LPGA, but not to relax. During the winter quarter, she took 22 credits’ worth of classes and played virtually no golf. Still, the heavy school workload took a toll on her body, as Zhang started suffering neck spasms.
In her return to golf at last year’s Ford Championship, she missed the cut. Shortly after, her neck pain became acute, and she took a month off for rehab. When she returned at the Mizuho Americas Open, she missed the cut again.
Zhang made the cut in only seven of 14 starts last year.
“The struggles were discouraging,” Zhang said. “Because I had such high expectations with myself on the golf course, even when I didn’t prepare to the extent that everyone else was, or even when I didn’t prepare at all, I would still have the same expectation of myself when I was out there and that was difficult.”
But now Zhang is back, without the responsibilities that came with school. This means more practice and preparation time.
“It’s safe to say I will be travelling to see my coach,” Zhang said. “I’ll be grinding when I’m in off weeks. I’m understanding what it actually means to recover.”
When it comes to her game, Zhang says she’s placing an emphasis on improving her putting and short-game creativity. In many ways, she’s starting over.
“I’m going back to the basics of the golf swing and trying to make sure that I’m sequencing myself properly and also not using so much hands to do all the work,” Zhang said.
While it would be great to win, Zhang says her measure of success this year is more systematic than results-based.
“If I were to place an actual measure it would be the body's healthy,” Zhang said. “Making sure that I’m hitting workouts and recovering. And then also not being blind to the things around me. Making sure that I’m on top of personal morals as well as being out there and practicing. If I do those, I’ll have no regrets.”
The world has seen “Rose the golfer” and “Rose the student”, but will we see other sides of Zhang in the future? She says it’s possible, and she loves doing community work. But maybe that’s for a future date.
“Maybe I should take care of the golf first,” Zhang said. “Honestly I feel like I’m versatile enough to segue into other sectors so I don’t really know what that looks like right now. But it’s an exciting time and I think I’m in a really good spot.”
Everett Munez
