Looking backward, the dots always connect. Sierra Sanchez keeps coming back to this phrase as she lays out the story of how she drew hundreds of women into her Millennielle Golf Club, a millennial women’s golf community of roughly 1,000 members which she founded and grew in the Phoenix metro area over the past four years.
“When I say the dots connect working backward,” said Sanchez, 32, “I worked at a lot of different companies … but each one of them gave me a little bit of the experience or a piece of the puzzle that helped me also start this group. I understood branding very well, and I’ve been a golfer my whole life.”
Sanchez, a Phoenix native, played high school golf at Xavier Prep, a team famous for winning Arizona state titles and churning out NCAA Division I talent. She was a teammate of Cheyenne Woods and Sarah Schmelzel, both of whom would go on to play on the LPGA.
“When you’re on a golf dynasty team like that, it’s very easy to feel like you’re underperforming all the time,” Sanchez said. “I wasn’t good enough for a DI school, so when recruiting time happened, I was really looking for that sweet spot. I wanted to study fashion. I was like, How am I going to find a school that has a ladies golf team that will give me a scholarship and also has a fashion major?”
She nearly fell over the day she met the women’s golf coach at Academy of Art, an NCAA Division II school in San Francisco, while at a recruiting combine with her mom and sister. It had everything she wanted.
“I cannot make that up,” Sanchez said, snapping her fingers between each word for emphasis. “How did that exist? But it did, and it found me.”
Sanchez loved the experience. She pursued a minor in fashion, as she had always wanted, while earning a degree in multimedia communications. That spun into a career in social media, which was a relatively new concept for many brands and companies when she graduated in 2014. Sanchez remained in San Francisco, working first for a startup and then scoring a job in social media with Pottery Barn.
By the end of 2016, Sanchez was ready to move back to Phoenix, take a break and reconnect with golf. She spent roughly nine months running the beverage cart at the Arizona Biltmore Golf Club in Phoenix in 2017 before returning to marketing in 2018.
Back home, Sanchez found she was fielding the same request over and over inside her friend group: Can you teach me how to play golf? She thinks at least 15 friends came to her with the idea, which eventually set off a light bulb. There’s something to this, she thought, and she took each request seriously.
Sanchez keeps a page in her personal planner, updated weekly, with people to call or text. If she extends an offer for coffee or drinks, she follows through on it – always. That she catalogs her contacts this way shows her affinity for people and relationships.
She knew she wanted to come through for all these women, but she also knew time and money would be an obstacle – unless she could connect them all together into one big golf group.
“I just knew how to put all the pieces together,” said Sanchez, and that included bartering dog-sitting services for a graphic-designer friend and former college teammate in exchange for the creation of the club logo, created, fittingly, in the Pantone color of the year: millennial pink.
It also included revisiting relationships from the Biltmore to get a group rate and afternoon tee times for her upstart league, and – perhaps most importantly – starting an Instagram page for her group to get the message out and build the community.
Sanchez’s first event was postponed seven months because of the pandemic, but when it finally happened in September 2020, 12 women showed up. That number grew to 20 by the next month. Now, monthly nine-hole outings fluctuate between 20 and 40 players. Sanchez likes to cut it off there because she personally groups the women for each outing based on similar personalities, interests, backgrounds or stages in life. This may be the real key to her club’s meteoric growth.
“I really get to know everybody, and I’m following them on Instagram, too, so I’ll peek through and watch stories – see somebody gets engaged, another person has a baby,” she said.
“I think there is more I can do as far as fostering and really investing in and supporting the community that I’ve built.” — Sierra Sanchez
Sometimes, Sanchez finds that when she’s greeting women at an event, she may not know their actual names, but she does know their Instagram handles. Social media has been key not only in growing the community as players show up and share their experiences, but also because Sanchez uses it for connection – particularly Instagram’s direct-message feature. That’s how players sign up for Millennielle events. Sanchez finds it to be a much more personal way of doing business than simply posting a link and relying on players to do the work on their own.
“When you make the connection, if they DM me, they have the opportunity to ask me questions or they can say, I want to sign up for this. How do I do it?” she said. “And then I have that exchange, and now we’re connected.”
The dots connect looking backward. There is no better example of this than the rapid growth Millennielle Golf Club has experienced under Sanchez’s guidance and the relationships she’s made as a result. Sanchez has attracted attention across the industry, including from places such as Grass Clippings, a fully-lit 18-hole public course in Phoenix that invited Sanchez to host a holiday pop-up shop featuring women’s golf brands to help get more females into their golf shop. She recently hosted her June Millennielle outing there, too.
The Arizona Golf Association sought out Sanchez and partnered with her to put on a women’s golf clinic at Papago Golf Club in Phoenix in November. Millennielle Golf Club recently became an affiliated club under the AGA.
Kylie Shoemake, championships manager for the Arizona Golf Association, played college golf at Valparaiso University and discovered Millennielle Golf Club on Instagram when she began looking for a group of women with whom to play. She found Sanchez to be welcoming, gifted at pairing players and introducing them and a positive, constant presence during the round.
“She’s a girl’s girl. She supports everyone,” Shoemake said in describing Sanchez.
In March, Shoemake attended a women’s event with Sanchez and was once again blown away by watching Sanchez in her element.
“She stopped and talked to everyone, got their business card, listened to how they got into golf,” she said. “She was not afraid to strike up a conversation with someone. She does that at the club, but even off the course. It just says so much about a person.”
While Sanchez devotes considerable energy to keeping up with the many members of her newfound golf community, she also maintains a full-time job as a digital content manager for the Arizona Association of Realtors. She looks at Millennielle Golf Club, which is not a for-profit venture, as “my gift to the gals.” There may be more growth for Millennielle Golf Club down the road, but Sanchez imagines it would be more along the lines of adding a newsletter, for example, or a marketing outlet.
“I don’t think the outlet is through making Millennielle a business,” she said, “but I think there is more I can do as far as fostering and really investing in and supporting the community that I’ve built.”
Count on Sanchez to connect the dots.