Sarah Schmelzel had one goal at the beginning of the 2024 LPGA Tour season: make the U.S. Solheim Cup team.

After coming close in 2023, ultimately finishing 16th in the U.S. Solheim Cup Team point standings at the end of the season, and after missing out on the 2023 CME Group Tour Championship by just a single spot, coming 61st in the Race to the CME Globe at the end of regular-season play, Schmelzel knew it was time to buckle down and start really focusing on the things she wanted to accomplish as a professional golfer as she looked ahead to another year competing on the LPGA Tour.

A win was high on the list. So was a major title and moving up in both the Rolex Women’s World Golf Rankings and Race to CME Globe.

But it was the Solheim Cup that Schmelzel inked at the top of her list of goals for the 2024 season, determined to make her lifelong dream a reality and qualify for this year’s competition at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club.

“I sat down with my team the first week of the offseason, and I was like, this is my sixth year on Tour. I have these goals I want to accomplish. Let's get down to the real nitty-gritty stuff of how I can accomplish these,” Schmelzel said. “I changed swing coaches. I hired a putting coach, still working with my mental coach and same physio and same trainer, but we all really got down to the unfun stuff, the tiny detail type of things.

“Although I had been serious about it in the past, finishing that way last year was a real motivation to get after these goals that I want to accomplish on Tour, Solheim being number one, wanting to be on one of those teams. I think that the work over the offseason really paid dividends for what we were trying to accomplish.”

Schmelzel came out swinging early in the year, tying for eighth at the HSBC Women’s World Championship in Singapore and nearly becoming a Rolex First-Time Winner at the Blue Bay LPGA in March, ultimately finishing runner-up to Bailey Tardy in the People’s Republic of China.

She picked up another top-10 result after tying for eighth at the FIR HILLS SERI PAK Championship and did the same at the Ford Championship presented by KCC in Gilbert, Ariz., not too far from her native Phoenix. It was a stellar stretch of golf that saw Schmelzel climb to eighth in the U.S. Solheim Cup Team point standings, already well within reach of her goal after her first six starts of the season.

But then, things shifted for Schmelzel, and not in a good way.

She missed her next two cuts at the T-Mobile Match Play presented by MGM Rewards and The Chevron Championship, tying for 66th in the tournament after before missing three more cuts in May. On paper, it looked like Schmelzel had just found herself in a slump, which happens to professional golfers from time to time, even after extended periods of excellent play.

In reality, however, Sarah was battling with something much more serious than poor golf, something that was totally and completely out of her immediate control.

Endometriosis had been a constant presence in her life for a number of years, a condition Sarah was used to dealing with and knew how to power through while competing as a pro athlete on the biggest stage in women’s golf.

But it was the rupture of an ovarian cyst early in the week at The Chevron Championship, something that’s common in those with endometriosis, that derailed her upward trajectory, landing her in the hospital the day before play began at The Club at Carlton Woods.

She decided to still compete despite the immense pain she was feeling and wound up carding rounds of 75-76 at the season’s first major championship, ultimately missing the cut in The Woodlands, Texas.

After that, Sarah no longer felt like herself, physically or mentally, on or off the golf course.

Her game went into a tailspin, a spiral that began to threaten her chances of making the U.S. Solheim Cup Team in the fall. It was a blow that blindsided Schmelzel, as she had put in so much effort early in the year to move up in the point standings, and it had her wondering if all of her hard work had been for naught.

But when times got tough and the future felt uncertain, Sarah leaned hard on her support system, not only relying on her family back home in Arizona but also on those she had surrounded herself with on the LPGA Tour to help her stay the course and trust that things would work out in her favor.

“I totally lost my golf swing. I didn’t have any feel,” Schmelzel said. “I continued to try to play through it because I had gotten off to a good start, and I was trying to get Solheim points. It took a lot of work from my physio on the road, my trainer at home, my coach, and then my mental coach for getting me through it emotionally.

“I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to get back to a performance state because I started missing cuts, and I didn’t know where the golf ball was going. It was hard to work through.”

After missing another cut at the U.S. Women’s Open, Schmelzel had slipped to 12th in the point standings, not putting her entirely out of the conversation but leaving her needing to right the ship quickly if she wanted to remain on U.S. Solheim Cup Captain Stacy Lewis’ radar as the qualification period began to wrap up.

Schmelzel got things back on track with a T30 showing at the Meijer LPGA Classic for Simply Give and then grabbed her fifth top-10 result of the season after tying for ninth at the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship at Sahalee Country Club, a finish that moved her to ninth in the Solheim Cup point standings, now two spots away from automatic qualification.

Sarah Schmelzel

But she dropped back to 10th in points after The Amundi Evian Championship, and that’s where she stayed until the LPGA Tour headed back to Europe for the ISPS Handa Women’s Scottish Open and the AIG Women’s Open, the final two events before the U.S. Solheim Cup Team would be finalized.

Knowing what she needed to do and resolved to not let the opportunity slip away, Schmelzel dug deep, finishing solo eighth at Dundonald Links to remain at 10th in the point standings with just the year’s final major left to either play her way into the last qualifying spot or make a solid case to Lewis for a captain’s pick.

In some of the most difficult conditions many of the field had ever played in at the AIG Women’s Open, Schmelzel successfully made the cut and finished in a tie for 29th at the Old Course at St Andrews. But she still wasn’t certain if she had done enough to make the team come the end of the final round, that is, until she sat down with Lewis and Assistant Captain Angela Stanford on Sunday night in Scotland.

“There was a lot of pressure on those two weeks, maybe self-induced, but also just knowing the gravity of the situation, of I have two events before this team is finalized,” said Schmelzel. “Sitting there with Stacy and Angela, who told me on Sunday of the British Open that evening, it was as much of a relief as it was joy. It was this thing that had been sitting in the back of my mind for the entire year.

“I went through that six-, seven-week stretch where I dealt with some health issues. After getting off to such a good start to the year and then having that happen, which felt very out of my control, I felt like this great start that I had to the year was going to get squandered because I had this health issue happen.

“Then to be able to climb my way out of it, and get back into contention, and get back into performing, it was a really emotional moment when they did tell me because I felt like I did fight through a lot in that middle portion of the year to get to that point.”

Now, after everything she has gone through over the last eight months, Schmelzel will finally get to cross making a U.S. Solheim Cup Team off her list of lifelong goals. Few are as excited as the 30-year-old to get things rolling at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club, but Schmelzel is working hard to savor every moment of an experience she wasn’t sure was going to happen for her this season, grateful to be given the chance to represent the United States in one of the most prestigious events in the women’s game.

“This is a dream come true kind of a thing,” said Schmelzel, who is a Solheim Cup rookie. “I know it's going to be such an unbelievable once-in-a-lifetime experience because I feel like it's the opportunity of a lifetime to be able to represent your country and be on a Solheim Cup team. I feel like it's going to exceed every expectation. My expectations are over the moon, and I feel like it’s going to be 10 times that.”

And while her golf certainly did a lot of talking for her as she battled for a Solheim Cup these last eight months, it’s Sarah’s grit and resilience that has spoken the loudest volumes about her character as both an athlete and a human being this season, two attributes that will be a welcome addition to the 2024 U.S. Solheim Cup Team.

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Sarah Schmelzel Bringing Grit, Resiliency to U.S. Team as Solheim Cup Rookie

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