Lee Ponders Switch From Rinks to Links

Sometimes, Jennie Lee wishes she hadn’t given up a promising figure skating career to focus on golf.

Surely her opponents on the links wish she hadn’t.

Lee, a senior at Huntington Beach Edison, has become one of the nation’s top girls’ golfers since trading in her skates for soft spikes when she was 8.

Ranked No. 5 in the Golfweek national ratings, Lee, 17, has won five national junior events. Last summer, she made the cut at the U.S. Women’s Open and advanced to the second round of match play at the U.S. Women’s Amateur championship.

Despite her success, she can’t help but wonder where skating might have taken her.

“There’s this feeling inside that I could have been someone like Michelle Kwan,” Lee said. “I can’t really explain it. I just think that if I had continued to skate, I could have been a really successful skater.”

Lee, born in South Korea, began skating at 3. She had won numerous competitions and showed enough promise that her family moved to the United States to further her training.

Soon, however, her older brother Daniel grew bored, sitting at home while she was off skating, so he took up golf. Transporting two children to different sports practices became taxing for their parents, so Jennie decided to join her brother on the links.

“My mom said I cried every day for like a year, especially when they had ice skating on TV,” she said.

Golf soon filled the void, and Lee quickly became competitive. The balance required in skating helped her build a golf swing that earned Lee numerous junior-level tournament victories.

In the last three years, she has become a force on the national circuit and earned first-team All-American honors from the American Junior Golf Assn. this year after a second-team honor last year and honorable mention in 2002.

In November, Lee won the Polo Golf Junior Classic, one of junior golf’s major championships.

In 2002, she was runner-up at the Southern Section individual finals and last year she finished fourth. A Times’ All-Star last year, Lee shot seven under par for the season.

Despite her success at the high school level, Lee said her priority is national competition, and she contemplated skipping her senior season to prepare for college.

She will decide between Arizona, Duke and UCLA next week. All have won a national championship in the last five years.

“I was just kind of thinking about it,” she said of not playing this season. “It takes three hours just to play nine holes, so it takes away from my time to work on my own game ... but then I kind of felt bad.”

Edison Coach Paul Harrell has given Lee some leeway. He allows her to miss practice and selected nonleague matches. He said the other girls on the team don’t have a problem with the special treatment.

“They know she’s not just out goofing around,” Harrell said. “They know she practices three hours a day every day. The only drawback is that they don’t get to see how hard she works and what it takes to be that good.”

Lee’s private instructor is noted teacher Tom Sargent at Mesa Verde Country Club in Costa Mesa. The two have worked together for five years and have developed a swing that produces amazing accuracy and takes advantage of Lee’s superior balance.

The same balance that allowed her to stay on her skates when she was a child.

“I don’t really regret quitting ice skating,” Lee said. “But I think I’ll always wonder what might have been.”