AMATEUR WATCH
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From her home course and country to the international fairways and now a college student in Tennessee, USA, this rising young GolfRSA product is making her way up the ladder
BY CLINTON VAN DER BERG
Isabella
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There's a particular kind of maturity that comes from losing twice on the biggest stage before you ever win it.
Kyra van Kan, the 20-year-old South African golfer from Glendower Country Club in Johannesburg, wears that maturity lightly. In conversation she's warm, quick to laugh, and disarmingly reflective for someone who's spent most of her life chasing a small white ball around some of the world's most demanding courses. But scratch the surface of her answers and you find something sharper: a competitor who has turned heartbreak into hope.
Van Kan picked up a golf club at age 10 and followed her father John onto the course in a relationship that remains the emotional centre of her game.
'He tells me not to take things so seriously, to see the big picture and just enjoy every moment. I always call my dad before I tee off in tournaments, because he settles my mindset and brings me back down to earth,' she says.
Before her career-defining moment of winning the SA Women’s Amateur came two years of near-misses, where she finished runner-up twice. Rather than souring her, the disappointment seemed to spur her. By the time she returned in 2023, something had clicked. She wasn't playing her sharpest stroke play, by her own admission, but she trusted that match play rewards belief over form, and that trust carried her to the title.
'It's so easy for us to take it for granted and just care about results. My long-term goal would be to be able to enjoy a round of golf even if I don't play well'
SHORT PUTTS
South African snack you miss most while living in Tennessee? 'Biltong. Every time I come home I ask my dad for biltong.'
If you could listen to music while practising on the range, who's the first artist on your playlist? 'I'm a big 70s-80s girl – Michael Jackson, 100 percent.'
The worst, most frustrating rule in golf that you'd erase? 'Out of bounds. It wastes so much time having to walk all the way back to the tee box.'
A secret talent or hobby most fans wouldn't guess? 'I'm really good at fishing. I love pretty much every sport there is.'
One club, excluding the putter, to get you around an entire 18 holes? 'My 5-wood. I can use it off the tee, punch it, get it around. That's probably the one I trust most.'
Who's easier to please: An SEC golf gallery, or the monkeys roaming the fairways at Leopard Creek? 'The monkeys. Anything pleases them, a banana or your left-over snacks in your golf bag.'
That same drive showed up again at Leopard Creek, where she won the Africa Amateur in 2024 by a wide margin, a result that earned her an invitation to the R&A Women's Amateur in Ireland.
Ask her about the pressure of protecting a big lead, and she'll tell you she didn't feel much of it at all. She was too busy falling in love with the golf course, treating what could have been a nerve-wracking coronation as something closer to a gift to be savoured.
'The nerves and the butterflies are always going to be there, so when I step onto that first tee, I try to channel all of that into hitting the ball further,' she says.
That instinct, to stay present rather than get swallowed by the moment, threads through everything she says. On the first tee, where the nerves inevitably show up, she doesn't try to eliminate them. She breathes through them and redirects that adrenaline into the swing itself.
Long before Tennessee, GolfRSA’s junior pathway sent Van Kan overseas, twice to Scotland, twice to Japan – trips she credits as pivotal to her development. She'd come home from those tournaments visibly sharper, shooting under par and carrying herself with more composure on big stages, simply from having tested herself against deeper fields of competition. It's a detail that says something about the modern women's amateur game. Van Kan's readiness for elite competition was forged as much on foreign fairways as on the course at Glendower.
Her move to the University of Tennessee brought a culture shock she describes candidly. Adjusting to a programme with the scale and expectations of the 'Lady Vols' took her freshman year to fully absorb. But what emerged from that adjustment has been a programme-record scoring run and a golfer who talks about her sport differently than she used to.
The biggest shift, she says, has been golf IQ – course management she simply didn't have in her junior days. Her natural instinct was always aggression: attacking flags, chasing danger, and paying for it with the occasional blow-up hole. Tennessee's coaching staff re-oriented her around a simpler, more disciplined idea: play to the fattest part of the green and let consistency do the work that aggression used to. They've also sharpened her short game with a level of precision she didn't have before, building her a wedge distance chart calibrated to specific swing lengths, the kind of granular detail that turns talent into consistency.
For now, Van Kan is focused on finishing her degree, though the pro game is clearly on her mind. She's mapping out two possible paths: a strong senior year that might open a door to the Epson Tour and eventually the LPGA, or a more traditional route through the Sunshine Ladies Tour toward the Ladies European Tour. Either way, she's not rushing it.
Asked to name a dream foursome for a practice round at Augusta National, she doesn't hesitate: her father, for the calm he's given her since she was 10; Tiger Woods, for his mentality; and Rory McIlroy, for his ball-striking. It's a telling trio – equal parts family, mindset, and craft, which is more or less the exact combination that's carried Kyra van Kan this far already.
Steve Flynn | WAGC
