Joelle Johnson is excelling at golf. It’s all her grandfather, who was barred from all-white golf courses, ever wanted.
When Joelle Johnson turned 4, her grandfather, Hermon, handed her a plastic golf club and said, “Let’s go swing a few of them.”
“It’s in your blood,” he always told her and her younger sister, Malaya. “But you have to feel it.”
The eldest Johnson settled Tuscon, Arizona, for its abundant golf culture but learned to play in Arkansas, chipping in his father’s front yard in the 1940s and 50s. However, he couldn’t actually play on whites-only courses, limited to caddying until he moved to St. Louis as an adult. The PGA itself wouldn’t allow Black players until 1961.
Without lessons available to him, Hermon crafted his style from the pages of a book. He taught his son, Eric, to play, and then, his granddaughters.
“She reflects what I thought one day I’d be able to do,” Hermon Johnson said, “and didn’t have the opportunity at the time.”
Her competition slate extends far beyond the private school spring season. In April each of the last two years, she’s competed in the Mack Champ Invitational, a tournament that invites the top youth minority players in the country. This year she finished in a tie for 15th, shooting a 13-over-par 157 at The Club at Carlton Woods in Texas, just outside of Houston. It’s the same course on which the LGPA held its Chevron Championship shortly after.
“As a girl of color, I don’t normally play against a lot of people that look like me,” Johnson said.
Johnson, who recently committed to play golf collegiately at Division I Bucknell in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, didn’t start competing until around age 9 and 10, when her mother’s job took her to Switzerland and she’d often cross the nearby French border to play. She learned she was pretty good when she started edging out other competitors pretty regularly. She picked up a resourcefulness from limitations in the French tournaments that American ones wouldn’t have (such as a ban on rangefinders). Her goal was always to play Division I in the states.
But there was a hollowness to it all in Johnson. She didn’t see any other golfers that looked like her, nor spoke her language. Nice as the other kids were, they didn’t make for much competition. Her victorious swings were mechanical, her grandfather’s pleas to “feel it” gathering dust in the recesses of her mind. She never loved golf, she said. She only liked it.
Then, just before her freshman year, Johnson moved back to the United States, where she found her game didn’t sweep over the competition as it did overseas. It would take work.
“There were so many good girls that you had to bring your A-game,” Johnson, now a senior at Indian Creek, said. “There’s not a lot of women’s programs in college and there’s not a lot of spots. I think that pushed me to want to achieve my goals, to get the spot in the school I wanted.”
She sat down with her father and strategized. Schedule more tournaments. Practice more hours. Acquire better equipment. Her father still helps arrange her tournaments, travels with her and aids in her coaching.
With his help, Johnson reached out to 150 coaches her sophomore season to jumpstart the recruiting process. However, her game fell below her own standards as a junior, the most crucial year for recruiting.
Her scoring average lingered too high. So, she responded by scheduling even more, as many as three tournaments a month. She’d miss classes, sleepovers with friends, only balancing it all with time off if she felt herself verging on burnout.
Her scoring average lingered too high. So, she responded by scheduling even more, as many as three tournaments a month. She’d miss classes, sleepovers with friends, only balancing it all with time off if she felt herself verging on burnout.
“I’m a better player now, for sure,” she said.
Indian Creek coach Brad Woodward considers Johnson the “lightning bolt her team needed”, his very best — an easily defensible take considering what she’s done. She joined the Indian Creek golf club three years ago, a group that would become the varsity squad. The Eagles returned to Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association coed competition in 2023 after a seven-year hiatus just to win back-to-back titles in the C Conference with Johnson at the helm.
“What’s really set her apart from her peers and other players in the league is she has the ability to stay within herself and execute,” Woodward said, “and it’s just crazy to watch her play like that.”
It wasn’t just the hours Johnson put in that advanced her to her goals, but the quality of them. She built her swing beyond the average high schooler, hammered out skill specialty shots to land where she wanted like a pitcher paints the frame.
“Once she got that extra training, it made all the difference,” Eric Johnson said. “She took off.”
There have only been eight Black LGPA Tour members as of the end of the 2023 season, according to “Forbes.” In her first year with Indian Creek, Johnson was the only Black girl on the team. This spring, there’ll be three, including her and her little sister. She keeps in close touch with the Black girls she meets on the tournament circuit.
“She knows there’s not gonna be a whole lot of girls that look like her, but I think that’s motivation,” Eric Johnson said. “We see now some of the top players on the LGPA level are brown girls like her, and she’s inspired by them, sure, but she wants to toe her own path. She’s probably the shortest one out there and the darkest, but for her, she’s so focused, that’s where her confidence comes from. It doesn’t bother her that everyone looks different. She knows she can play and that’s what she wants to go out and do.”
Hermon flies to Maryland to watch Johnson compete when he can. He still gives her advice, saying he wants her to work on her confidence, her pitch shots, her chip and her putting. She has knack at getting the ball up and down with a smooth, rhythmic swing. He gave her that all those years ago.
“To pass the game on to my granddaughters, to see them compete on the best golf courses in the country, to see all that [Joelle] has developed, that she has a scholarship to a university – it makes me feel good about life,” Hermon Johnson said. “It makes me feel grateful.”
This story was originally published in the Capital Gazette.
This story was originally published in the Capital Gazette.
Indian Creek School
Indian Creek school is a co-educational, college preparatory independent school, located in Crownsville, Maryland. Students in Pre-K3 through grade 12 receive a vibrant educational experience based on excellent academics steeped in strong student-teacher connections.
