A Game of Her Own
Fifteen-year-old rising golf star Sadie Westbrook balances school, tournaments, and life between Houston and Kiawah with grit, calm, and pure love of the game.
Story by Hailey Wist | Photographs by Patrick O’Brien
Most fifteen-year-olds are focused on learner’s permits, high school dances, and weekend sleepovers. Sadie Westbrook, on the other hand, is thinking about golf course strategy, reading greens, and how to stay calm in the final holes of a tournament.
A rising star in junior golf, Sadie has built a life that doesn’t look like a typical teenager’s. She attends a virtual school for athletes that allows her the flexibility to practice golf and travel for tournaments. Her week falls into a steady rhythm of schoolwork, practice, and tournaments. “I’ll do a few hours of classes, then head out to the course,” she says. “Some days I take my schoolwork with me and practice between classes.” Fridays are usually full golf days, and weekends are almost always tournaments.
It’s a schedule that might overwhelm some teenagers, but Sadie shrugs it off with the ease of someone who’s already figured out what she loves. “I try to take a day off after tournaments to take a break and reset,” she says matter-of-factly. “But I love it. I’d rather be on the course than anywhere else.”
That love started early. As a little kid, her natural athleticism was evident. She played competitive softball and went to the Junior Olympics to run the 1600. But her dad, Kris, put a club in her hand when she was five, and by eleven she had turned all of her attention to golf. “She realized if she was going to lose, she wanted it to be on her terms,” Kris says. The individuality of the game hooked her—and the opportunities didn’t hurt either. More scholarships, more potential, more space to grow.
And grow she has. In November of 2024, at just fourteen, she won Kiawah Island Club’s Women’s Championship, storming back from three shots down with four holes to play. It was raining, forty people were watching, and Sadie played with such composure that only a subtle thumbs up to her dad gave her excitement away.
Part of that calm comes from training her mind as much as her swing. Sadie works with a mental coach who has taught her to reset every three holes: untuck her shirt, tie her shoes, eat a snack. “It makes me feel fresh,” Sadie explains. “Like I get to start over.” If a shot goes sideways, she gives herself ten steps to be mad, then moves on. It’s a routine that works, and one that makes her mom smile. “She’s so much better at resetting now,” Traci says. “It’s amazing to watch.”
Like so many professional athletes, Sadie has quirks and superstitions that define tournament mornings. Breakfast is always the same. Her clothes are laid out the night before. Kris has to choose her ball marker. “And I don’t make my bed,” Sadie says with a grin. “That’s part of it too.” Kris blasts “pump-up music” throughout the house before they leave. The Lumineers are her favorite.
Back in Houston, the Westbrooks have a putting green in the backyard and a simulator in the garage. “If she can’t be on the course, she and Kris are out there at night practicing,” Traci says. “She loves it.” Sadie doesn’t have many teenage golf buddies in Texas—most of her playing partners are older golfers who are thrilled to watch her talent up close. “They try to get in my head sometimes,” she says, laughing. “But it’s fun. It’s good practice.”
Her younger brother Harrison, thirteen, is equally proud—though quick to remind everyone that he had a hole-in-one before his sister did. Sadie now has one of her own, right here on Kiawah last summer. It was on Cassique, and the pin was tucked behind a hill. “I didn’t even see it! We walked up, and my mom looked in the cup and there it was,” she remembers. The Club made a shadow box, which hangs in their Kiawah house, to commemorate it.
Kiawah has been part of Sadie’s story since she was three, when the family first bought a cottage on the Island. Today, their home near River Course serves as a summer base, a place where golf mixes easily with fishing, bike rides, skim boarding, and nighttime wiffle ball games with neighborhood kids. “It’s so different from Houston,” Sadie says. “Here it’s calm. There are no car horns, no sirens.”
Kiawah Island Club’s River Course has become a home base for Sadie, offering both challenge and inspiration as her game continues to advance.
That balance matters. Kris and Traci are intentional about keeping the pressure light, even as they support her unusual path. “She’s the one driving the bus,” Kris says. “If she wants a day off, she takes it. I don’t want her to be the best fifteen-year-old—I want her to keep getting better little by little.”
For now, Sadie’s goals are clear. She wants to play Division I college golf. Beyond that? Professional golf is the dream. She studies the swings of Nelly Korda and Ludvig Åberg, copying their movements with an uncanny knack for observation. “She can watch a video and mimic it almost instantly,” Kris says.
But the future can wait. Right now, Sadie is enjoying the journey—the tournaments, the travel, the friendships that spring up across the junior golf circuit, and summers at Kiawah. She is determined, hardworking, competitive—her own words. She’s also still a teenager who celebrates with a fist bump, ties her shoes for a reset, and loves the feeling of a freshly marked ball in her pocket.
