EVANS, GEORGIA | Scarlett Schremmer was polite and respectful, but there was little hiding her irritation that she’d let a good first day get away from her at Champions Retreat. Two-under par and tied for fifth at the turn in her Augusta National Women’s Amateur debut, she gave back three strokes on her inward nine to make her goal of qualifying for the final round at Augusta National that much harder.
“I just hit a few errant shots on the back nine,” the 18-year-old said after her opening 73, her darting eyes revealing that she didn’t really want to talk about sitting 10 shots behind Megha Ganne’s record-breaking 9-under opening-round mark. “But no, it’s fine. All positive emotions. I mean, a little bit nervous, a little excited, a little bit everything, a little bit of a discouraging finish coming in. But, I mean, I played pretty well for the first two and a half hours. And it’s just nice to have people out here supporting women’s golf.”
The perils of golf must feel strange to a young woman who fearlessly followed her older sisters into the ocean and tackled the massive waves off the North Shore of Oahu. Schremmer became a three-time national shortboard surfing champion before she was a teenager or ever picked up a golf club. Golf courses don’t come crashing down on top of you or have unseen terrors lurking under the surface. Competitors don’t try to snake a wave from under you. Is there anything in golf as terrifying as riding a 30-foot wall of water?
“I don’t know. I mean, 50-yard bunker shots are pretty scary,” Schremmer said.
Schremmer walked away from competitive surfing immediately after winning her third national title at age 12. With her sisters gone to college – the oldest, Mason, to Australia, where she’s now a top-10 professional longboard surfer, and Lola to Purdue – Scarlett was burned out and lonely in the water and ready for something new. Her family had moved to just off the 14th hole on Hoakalei Country Club, which hosts an annual LPGA tournament. And, oh yeah, the mom who raised three surfing girls was a former LPGA player.
Patricia Ehrhart, now 59, chased mini-tours and Q-School for years trying to make it in professional golf. She led the money list on the Futures Tour in 1995, but that didn’t come with any LPGA exemption like Epson Tour leaders get now. She got married in 1997 and won the season-ending mini-tour event in Morgantown, West Virginia, and was content to take those winnings and a $5,000 bonus from Reebok and head home to Sarasota, Florida, with a positive balance in her checking account and a future doing something else.
But the bonus came with the stipulation that it be applied toward Q-School.
“I cried,” Ehrhart said. “I was bargaining with them. I’ll take only half. I don’t want to go back.”
But the self-proclaimed “slow quitter” went back, and instead of failing again she sank a 20-foot putt to earn her LPGA membership for the 1998 season. “Of course, when you finally give up and wave the white flag, I made it through Q-School and then it just drove me back in for another couple years.”
Pregnancy finally gave her an off-ramp and she was content raising three precocious girls and following them on the waves through her camera lens. Now here was her baby Scarlett wanting to take up her mother’s game and golf was suddenly back in Ehrhart’s life. She reclaimed her amateur status (as well as her maiden name after a divorce) and has had Scarlett caddying for her often in USGA events (Ehrhart was the low amateur in the 2022 U.S. Senior Women’s Open and a semifinalist in the 2016 U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur and the 2019 U.S. Senior Women’s Amateur).
But her bigger mission is helping Scarlett chase her new dreams, as a coach and, when she can, as her caddie, as she is this week at ANWA.
“I mean, everything in my golf game is pretty much owed to her and the work that we’ve put in together,” said Scarlett of her mom. “She’s a genie on the green. We get along really well. I mean, obviously there’s moments where I’m frustrated, she’s frustrated, or I didn’t listen the right way, or we both don’t get that. She’s really patient with me and just encouraging, and we try to keep the energy up.”
“The odds are definitely against every single person to get on the LPGA Tour or PGA Tour, because it’s so hard to get out there and stay out there. But if you put in the work and you enjoy what you do, I think something is possible.” – Scarlett Schremmer
Schremmer is determined to follow her mom’s footsteps and reach the LPGA Tour and join Myra and Mallory Blackwelder as only the second mother-daughter combo in history to make it to the LPGA Tour.
“The odds are definitely against every single person to get on the LPGA Tour or PGA Tour, because it’s so hard to get out there and stay out there,” said Schremmer. “But if you put in the work and you enjoy what you do, I think something is possible. There’s a lot of great girls in the field this week and I think probably almost everyone has aspirations of playing professional golf.”
Ehrhart says her daughter has more game than she had at the same stage of her golf career.
“She’s way better than I ever was. I really believe that,” Ehrhart said. “I think the junior girls, and I’m not cutting down anybody that I played with because we worked really hard … but I really think the girls on the AJGA today could probably, well, they all could have beaten me when I was playing mini-tours.”
Having only pursued golf in earnest for about five years, Schremmer has been quickly catching up to her peers. A growth spurt to just shy of 6 feet tall has certainly helped. She’s No. 75 in the World Amateur Golf Ranking, up dramatically from No. 467 last May when she joined the inaugural U.S. National Junior Team. She has committed to play at Texas A&M next season hoping coach Gerrod Chadwell’s program can keep developing her short game to further her mission to reach the professional ranks.
“I’m not in a rush, but I do want to play on the LPGA Tour sooner than later,” Schremmer said. “And my game is not there right now, but I think that I have the potential and I am willing to work to get my game to that spot. And the facilities (at Texas A&M) are great, the resources there are really good, and it’s just a supportive environment.”
Schremmer made her ANWA debut against a field loaded with many players like Ganne who have been competing every April in Augusta for nearly a decade starting with Drive Chip and Putt National Finals. But with the same determination that inspired her to begin surfing at age 3, she refuses to let her relative inexperience be a handicap.
“I don’t think I’m behind, I think I’m just younger than a lot of the girls, and I’ve only had five years to work on my short game, and they’ve had like 15,” she said. “So there’s maybe a little bit of a difference there, but I don’t really believe that to be true.
“Growing up in Hawaii, I surfed for the majority of my life. Surfing just requires a lot of hard work and discipline, like it does to be good at anything. And it’s definitely carried over into golf. I think I work extremely hard. It’s the same in any sport or any job, you kind of just set goals, then you take it one day at a time, and you try to keep working.”
“I was really lucky to have that relationship with [Jimmy Buffett]. I definitely wish I could still spend more time around him, but he was great for the time that we had him.” – Scarlett Schremmer
Some of that optimism Scarlett and her mother exhibit may have rubbed off from a close family friend – the late great musician Jimmy Buffett. Patricia struck up a lifelong friendship with Buffett when she was only 20 and some of her mini-tour mates met the singer at a concert in Troy, Wisconsin, after sneaking to the front of the stage when a torrential downpour chased most of the Parrotheads away. “Uncle Jimmy” was such a close presence in all the Schremmer girls’ lives growing up in Hawaii that they never realized what a big deal he was in the wider world.
When Ehrhart played in the U.S. Senior Women’s Open at Chicago Golf Club in 2018, Buffett was in town for a two-night gig at Wrigley Field. He visited Ehrhart on the range at the course and she took her girls to see his sold-out show.
“We got to Wrigley Field, and they’re like, ‘Why are all these people here? It’s just Jimmy,’” Ehrhart said. “They really had no idea. They were so amazed. They couldn’t believe it.”
Scarlett originally intended to attend Miami to be closer to Buffett before he died in 2023. “I was really lucky to have that relationship with him,” she said. “I definitely wish I could still spend more time around him, but he was great for the time that we had him.”
Scarlett is living the surf-and-turf life Buffett sang about, and she has the natural talent, motivation and “it factor” to make a name for herself. She illustrated that ability by fighting back from that first-round disappointment to shoot 3-under 69 on Thursday, finishing T17 and comfortably qualifying for Saturday’s final round at Augusta National. She’s one of only nine of the 33 first-time ANWA participants in the field to make the cut. She and her mom got a sneak peek playing Augusta National for the first time last week as a guest of a Shoal Creek friend who is a member.
“Survive in advance,” said Schremmer, crediting her mom with keeping her calm the last three holes of her second round after adrenaline had her so pumped up she blew a wedge over the 15th green coming off a crucial birdie at 14 that got her off the cut line. “I’m really excited. Walking down 18, I said to my mom, ‘Wow. I’m really glad I pulled it together, because it would have been embarrassing to have someone take me out to Augusta and then not even get to compete.’
“But I’m just excited to kind of contend and get some rhythm. I’m kind of glad we have an off day tomorrow to get some work done and see the golf course and take in the experience.”
Schremmer says the coolest thing she ever did on the waves was “surfing the pipeline in Hawaii. The waves are so scary, but it’s an adrenaline rush that’s pretty great. It might be more exhilarating than getting a hole-in-one, I don’t know. I haven’t really gotten a hole-in-one, though.”
What has she ever done in golf that compares?
“I think my favorite moment in golf is probably this week,” she said Wednesday when she was sitting T42. “It’s pretty cool. I mean, I didn’t play the way that I wanted to, but it’s been pretty great here. I’m disappointed right now, but I think looking back, this will be a great experience.”