By Dave Donelson
Sarah Brannigan’s achievements on the course are equaled by her accomplishments helping others. She got her first taste of golf when she was only 6 years old, but she began giving back to the game at age 10 when she started helping her First Tee coaches work with beginning golfers at Mosholu Golf Course in the Bronx.
“First Tee not only shaped me as a golfer,” she says, “but as the person I’ve become as well.”
Brannigan began competing in Met PGA Junior Tour events when she was 10 and was an avid participant in the First Tee and PGA Jr. League programs. She helped create the women’s golf team at St. Barnabas High School in the Bronx before transferring to the Ursuline School in New Rochelle, N.Y., where she played on the state championship team. In 2023, she played in the PGA Tour Champions’ Pure Insurance Championship at Pebble Beach and was chosen to serve on the LPGA*USGA Girls Golf Gen Z Council for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Golf was not only Brannigan’s passion during her high school years, but her job as well. She went to work at Westchester Country Club the summer before her sophomore year in high school and was assigned to drive the cart, ferrying players between the driving range and the first tee. The following year, she started caddieing, a job she continued until college. Looping helped her earn an MGA Caddie Scholarship and gave her a way to help other girls.
“My sophomore year,” she explains, “I was invited to the Innovators Forum, a national leadership conference sponsored by the First Tee where the speakers encourage participants to start service projects for their communities. I decided to create a program to encourage young women to become caddies.”
The Innovators Forum provided a stipend that enabled Brannigan to create an action plan for “She Can Carry,” an initiative to encourage girls to become caddies at local clubs.
Brannigan followed up with the girls afterward and reports that one landed a spot in the caddie ranks at Winged Foot Golf Club in Mamaroneck, N.Y. Now in her first year at Georgetown University, Brannigan is involved with the First Tee of Greater Washington, D.C., and hopes to introduce “She Can Carry” there.
In her spare time, Brannigan drew on her multimedia and computer science skills to help run the First Tee Summer STEM Academy as part of her GOLFWORKS internship. Each day, she posted videos giving over 100 virtual participants lessons on coding. That helped her earn a Women’s Metropolitan Golf Association (WMGA) Foundation STEM Scholarship.
What does the future hold for Brannigan? After she was named a 2024 Royal and Ancient Golf Club Scholar, she provided a glimpse: “This support will help finance my college education and provide me with mentorship to achieve my goal of becoming a chief financial officer for a nonprofit dedicated to the game of golf.”
Giving back to the game runs in the family for Emily and Luke Renoff. Their late grandmother, Susan E. Fisher, was an avid golfer who served on the board of the WMGA. Their mother, Katie Renoff, who played golf at Yale University and is a multiple-time club champion, serves on the WMGA board today. Emily, a standout on the golf team in her first year at Bowdoin College, launched a charity four years ago to fund a WMGA Foundation scholarship in her grandmother’s name.
“I was thinking about my grandmother and how important golf was to her when I decided to start ‘Birdies for Bright Futures,’” says Emily, who was about 10 when Fisher passed away.
Her goal is to raise $10,000 each year for a scholarship for junior girls. The program has hit its goal every year since it began in 2021. “People give donations or make pledges based on the number of birdies I make during the season in competitive rounds,” she explains. “It’s been so exciting because the recipients have been girls I’ve met during my own golf career.”
Scholarship recipients apply through the WMGA and are chosen in consultation with the WMGA board.
For the last seven years, both Emily and Luke, her younger brother, played in Juniors Fore Goryeb, a charity outing for young golfers that benefits the Kids4Kids Foundation of Morristown Medical Center’s Goryeb Children’s Hospital. The fundraiser has been held the last seven years at Roxiticus Golf Club in Mendham, N.J. Luke, a junior at Glen Ridge (N.J.) High School, joined the outing’s board and stepped up to help the organization raise $22,000.
Cole Ekert, MGA Junior Player of the Year in 2021, helped establish the Juniors for Goryeb outing with the Renoffs and two other local youth, Sydney and Whitney Lapper, who played on the golf team at Gill St. Bernard’s School in Gladstone, N.J.
“I was happy to do it because combining golf with support for the hospital where I was born was kind of a unique opportunity,” says Ekert, who co-chaired the board with Luke in 2024, the final year for the fundraiser. “With so many of us graduating from college and things like that, we decided we had reached our goals, and it was time to bring it to an end.” In the event’s seven years, it raised nearly $200,000 for the hospital.
Ekert has big plans after graduation from the University of Richmond this year. He intends to play in amateur events in the summer, then turn pro in time for the Met Open and try to qualify for the Korn Ferry Tour in the fall.
Claire Yu’s record book is full of achievements. Now a senior at Rye Country Day School in Rye, N.Y., she started playing golf competitively in eighth grade and last year finished in the top 10 seven consecutive times in Met PGA Junior Tour events, including her win of the New York City Championship at Pelham Bay Golf Course in the Bronx. She was also the WMGA junior girls’ champion in 2024 and won the ladies’ championship at her home club, Burning Tree Country Club in Greenwich, Conn. But that wasn’t enough.
“I’ve been on my school’s team since the eighth grade,” she says, “and I realized that not a lot of girls play golf when they’re little. They play soccer and field hockey instead. There are social and financial barriers, too. Early in my junior year, I started thinking about how I could make golf more accessible for girls so that more of them would play.”
Yu came up with GirlsGolfInc., a nonprofit dedicated to providing golf clinics for girls. “I wanted to create a completely free golf event for girls to try the game,” she says. “It needed to be really fun and completely accessible. Golf can also be intimidating, so it had to be inclusive. I talked to a lot of different courses until finally the Griffith E. Harris Golf Course in Greenwich agreed to do it. The Carmine Cerone Sportsmen Foundation was holding an event there that same day, and they funded it for us, so the course was completely free.”
Getting a venue was only part of the solution, though. Yu realized the girls she wanted to serve weren’t golfers, so they didn’t have any equipment. “We tried to get donations from some national corporations, but that didn’t work,” she says. “So in late March, I held a golf club drive. I put flyers all around town and got some people in the game to publicize it. I was optimistically expecting maybe 10 sets, but we got over 40. It was an amazing response, and it really energized us.”
Yu recruited participants from the Boys and Girls Club and a local middle school. “We asked girls to fill out a form with their age and size. Then we were able to put together sets of clubs that fit them. Each of the 20 girls got a set of clubs to keep. Old Navy donated shirts. We also got hats and golf balls donated.”
In May, the girls gathered at the course for a two-hour clinic on the range, short game area, and putting green led by three local PGA pros, Amber Richardson, Samantha Morrell, and Alexis Hios, who donated their time.
“When I went home,” Yu says, “I was a little bit troubled that it might be a one-time event for these girls, so I reached out to some local courses that have camps. Thanks to a generous donation from the Greenwich Old Timers Foundation, we were able to arrange for golf camp scholarships for some of the girls who wanted to keep playing.”
Even though Yu’s focus is on college applications now, she isn’t abandoning GirlsGolfInc. “This year, I’m hoping to make it bigger and better and even more fun.”
Declan Minnich, an MGA Caddie Scholar now in his freshman year at Baruch College in Manhattan, has created a video training program for prospective caddies to bring more young men and women into the game. “The goal,” he explains, “is to lower the barrier of entry to caddieing so people will realize they don’t have to live next door to a country club or have played the game for X number of years.”
Minnich started looping at Scarsdale Golf Club in Hartsdale, N.Y., when he was 14. His older brother went through the MGA caddie training program and brought Minnich into Scarsdale two years later as a rookie.
Two years ago, Minnich and another caddie, William Raines, pooled their resources and experience to launch the video training program. “It took a year to shoot all the videos and another year to edit them,” Minnich says. “We didn’t know anything about video when we started, but we figured it out. The course itself is finished; now we’re developing the website and working on a marketing strategy.”
Minnich and Raines hope to recoup their investment by selling the course to schools. “We put a lot of money into the camera equipment and editing stuff,” he explains. “We don’t want to make it super expensive but want to make it worth our while. I’ve always had a big interest in business and finance as well as golf, so this project kind of ties the two together. I’d love to have a career in the golf business.”
Loren Martinez, a senior at Maria Regina High School in Hartsdale, saw a problem with golf and put her mind to solving it. She joined her school’s golf club when it started in her sophomore year, but the organization struggled to launch. “There were only a handful of girls,” she says. “We would practice on the front lawn at school or in the courtyard with Wiffle balls.”
She’d enrolled in First Tee before her freshman year and played on a PGA Jr. League team as well as in some Met PGA Junior Tour tournaments. “I was able to play at some really nice courses,” she says, “so I knew the girls in the club weren’t experiencing real golf, and it would be difficult to keep up their interest.”
Her junior year, Martinez took on a leadership role in the club. “I got people to sign up during our school’s club fair, and 11 girls are now active,” she reports. “We went to the Game On Golf range right up the street from the school and to the PGA Tour Superstore in Scarsdale, where they let us use the simulators.”
Martinez also held a golf Rules class and has been working with the MGA and Golfzon in Scarsdale to keep club members engaged during the winter.
But she knows there’s more to be done, especially if the club is to evolve into an actual golf team. “Our gym teacher said the main problem is that we would need a home course,” she says. “That hasn’t been worked out yet. There are also transportation issues.”
Martinez is optimistic, however. “There are a handful of girls in the club who are very active and have improved so much since they joined. They attend almost every meeting and input their own ideas for the club. They also have worked hard to encourage more participation.”
Golf is a hard game. It has obstacles and setbacks and barriers and disappointments, but also accomplishments and rewards and achievements and satisfaction for those who persevere. To see how it’s done, all we have to do is look at the youngsters.