Kim found it fun with Rams
After playing golf from age 6 to 12, including a sixth-grade season of high school play when she attended Lake Mary Prep for one year, Jenny Kim briefly lost interest in the sport as she hit her teen years.
“I don’t think I was burned out, but I wasn’t practicing much at all,” Kim said of her seventhand eighth-grade days.
Then she enrolled as a freshman at Lake Mary High School and decided to join the one of the area’s best girls golf squads. The flames were fanned as Kim, as shy as she was, found it fun to be part of a team.
“High school golf changed how I looked at it,” she recalls. “It made everything more interesting. It was just a lot of fun.”
One disappointment — not making the cut to be one of the five Lake Mary girls who got to play in district, region and state tournaments in 2014 — inspired her even more.
“It motivated me to practice more and to try to be the best player on the team,” Kim said. She blossomed as a sophomore, finishing fifth in the Class 3A state tournament with a team-leading two-day score of 73-76—149 to lead the Rams to the championship.
Last year Kim was Lake Mary’s state leader again with a 72-79—151 score in windy conditions at Mission Inn as the Rams repeated.
As a senior, Kim hopes to lead Lake Mary to a threepeat and she has been playing the best golf of her life since the spring. She scored her first AJGA victory when she shot 74-74—148 at ChampionsGate in May to win the Sergio Garcia Foundation Junior Championship against an international field.
“Sergio Garcia was there to hand out the awards, so that was really memorable,” Kim said.
Rams coach Dennis Burchill said Kim will be remembered as a girl who focused on her skills while staying true to her team.
“Not to fault anyone else, but some girls around their senior year when things are going well they kind of drift away from high school golf,” Burchill said. “That’s understandable. Everyone has to think about their own progression. But Jenny has been all about us from the get-go. She never missed a match. She’s supportive of all the other girls. You love to have a girl like Jenny on your team.”
Lake Mary is the team to beat in Monday’s nineteam Class 3A, Region 2 tournament at Twin Rivers Golf Club in Oviedo. Two teams advance to the Nov. 3-4 state finals at Mission Inn.