Gabi Ruffels is a very unrookie Rookie for the LPGA Tour season of 2024.
By rights she should be pretty raw, given it’s only eight years since she started playing golf with any form of commitment and just six years since she enrolled at the University of Southern California on a golf scholarship. But, no, she’s not raw. At all.
A lot has happened in that short time, most of it unexpected by others. But this is a player with her head firmly screwed on, her feet firmly on the ground and her eyes not on the prize but the process. A player who seemingly came from nowhere yet has met challenges at every level of her development and used them as learning opportunities to springboard to the next level. And then repeated that. Learn, improve, leap, learn, improve, leap.
As she starts the 2024 LPGA season, it’s the same thing. No definite goals for her as such, just the desire to keep getting better.
“I’ll definitely focus on one step at a time and just raising my standard,” Ruffels tells Golf Australia magazine on the eve of her official debut event, the LPGA Drive On Championship. “I feel like everything takes care of itself, so I haven’t really set any distinct goals. I just enjoy the process. Things come from that, and then you adjust.”
There were goals very early on. Well, ambitions anyway. In 2017, aged 17 and in her second year in the Victorian state team, her profile for a story published in listed them as “go to college,
