Hayden Knapp emerging as a young standout on the golf course

Playing on a team with older teenage boys was going to be a huge step up for her daughter, a seventh-grader at Oliver W. Winch Middle School.

“I was a little worried about how they would accept her,” Adrienne Knapp said. “But the guys on the team have been great to her.”

Hayden Knapp has a game — and a maturity and focus — that defies her age. She’s still a 12-year-old, but she can hit the ball farther and straighter than many older kids.

That’s a good thing, because on the high school team, she has to play from the white tees, which are set further back than the red, or forward tees, the traditional “ladies” tees.

The fact that Knapp started out shooting 39s and 40s over nine holes in Foothills Council matches certainly helped her be accepted as a teammate.

“They’re really nice, they were great about the whole thing,” Hayden Knapp said. “The first part of the season was a real adjustment, but they helped me get back in my groove.”

“Having a 12-year-old girl on a mixed-competition team with a bunch of junior and senior boys, I wasn’t worried about her, more about how they would react,” South High coach Mike Yeager said. “And they immediately accepted her.”

Yeager said he didn’t know anything about the preteen from Gansevoort until he got the call from his parents over the summer about playing for the Bulldogs.

“I was doing a camp at Airway Meadows, and I needed to see her hit balls a bit, so I brought her out to the driving range,” Yeager said. “I knew within five swings of the golf club that she would be a good fit.”

At the Foothills Council tournament last month, Knapp shot a 75 — one of the best scores of the day at Fox Run in Johnstown. She helped South High win the team title.

“That felt good — it wasn’t an easy course,” Hayden Knapp said. “My putting was really good, I made some birdies, and even when I bogeyed, I knew I could still make birdies.”

On Monday, Knapp finished in a three-way tie for fourth in the Section II Girls Golf Tournament, shooting an 80 at The Edison Club in Rexford. That qualified her for the state tournament team.

“She did amazing — keeping everything in perspective, she’s 12, she doesn’t even turn 13 until May,” Yeager said. “She ended up with a 39.6 average this season — statistically, she was our No. 1 golfer. She’s very competitive, which is what makes her so good. She sets a very high bar for herself.”

Knapp’s first exposure to golf was going with her grandfather — Tom Knapp, the longtime former Hudson Falls teacher and coach — to Queensbury Country Club when she was very young.

“It was fun, but mostly I went for the snacks,” she said.

“Her grandfather was great with her — he’d take her along with him and she always enjoyed going with him,” Adrienne Knapp said. “He passed in 2018, and that was definitely difficult for her, but she just loves golf and she feels that connection to him.”

Hayden Knapp said she decided she wanted to take up golf when she was about 7, and started playing competitively soon after.

Her main golf coach is Bob Cain, the head teaching pro at Saratoga National, where Hayden is part of the junior golf academy. She has worked with Cain for almost six years.

“She just took off with it,” Cain said. “She took what I taught her, went home and practiced, and before you know it, she was getting really good. She put the work in, for sure. She’s one of the hardest-working kids I’ve ever met.”

Knapp’s junior golf career has been outstanding. Just this year, she placed in the top 15 of the New York State Women’s Amateur at McGregor Links, and in the top 10 of the State Girls Junior Amateur. She qualified with a 1-under 71 for the Notah Begay III Junior National Championship in Louisiana next month. This week, she played in the Junior League Championship this week in Scottsdale, Arizona with the Saratoga National/Anders Mattson Golf team.

“It’s really exciting — I love Arizona,” said Hayden, the oldest of Adrienne and Tom Knapp’s three children. “It will be more of a challenge, but we’re the first team from New York to qualify for this, so we’ll do our best and see what we can do.”

“We limit to one or two tournaments a month in the summer, and in the winter, we travel to one tournament a month,” Adrienne Knapp said. “We go every February to Arizona, plus we make it a family vacation.”

Hayden Knapp practices year-round at Mattson’s Saratoga Golf Studio indoor facility in Saratoga Springs during the winter months.

A member of Glens Falls Country Club, Knapp started playing from the white tees just this year, to get ready for the challenge of playing for the South High team.

“She loves the challenge of the distance,” Adrienne Knapp said. “She’s a long-ball player — against the girls, she outdistances all of them. Playing with the boys forces her to focus on her technical skills.”

Knapp’s drive off the tee is his “super-strength,” Cain said.

“She hits it farther than most kids her age, and farther than a lot of girls a couple of years older,” he added. “That will be key for her going forward. Her driver is her weapon. Her ball-striking in general is outstanding; she hits it really solid and hard.”

“She rarely misses a fairway,” Yeager said. “She’s very systematic with what she does, and she gets results. Her intent is to birdie every hole.”

“Driving is my favorite part,” Hayden said. “I hit it 230-ish (yards) on average, maybe 240 in Arizona because it’s warmer.”

Cain said cleaning up her short game — chipping, wedging and putting — has been the key to Knapp’s success.

“Even the best players in the world don’t hit it straight every time, that’s just the nature of the game,” he said. “So your wedging has to be the glue that holds it all together. Now she has a wedge game that saves her on those poor-hitting days.”

“It was a little transition to competing with older kids,” Hayden Knapp said. “All I changed was working on my chipping and my short game, so if I did miss the green, I could get up and down and save my par.”

Knapp’s coaches are impressed with her skills, approach and competitiveness, even at a young age, and are predicting good things to come.

“She’s a great kid, very smart, very mature for her age,” Yeager said. “She’s got a future playing golf.”

“She is beyond her years, that’s for sure,” Cain said. “And as good as she is at golfing, she’s an even better kid, and she has an incredibly supportive family, as well.”