From starting to play at a young age, and within a dozen years mixing it with the best, this teenager is proving that she's going places

BY CLINTON VAN DER BERG 

The turning point came at the SA Amateur B Division in 2021, a week she still replays vividly. Going into the final day she had no idea where she stood on the leaderboard, and she remembers falling apart on the closing holes. 'I had a couple of rough holes and I'm like, I can't believe I'm playing so badly, this is so embarrassing.'

Standing over her, offering the hug and the pep talk that turned the week around, was a golfer Van de Vyver had long idolised: Gia Raad.

The two have history that runs deeper than a chance encounter on the back nine. Van de Vyver grew up around Raad through the Ernie Els Foundation junior circuit, watching her from a distance before that day ever came. 'She was one of the girls I looked up to,' Van de Vyver says, and the admiration clearly still holds. It is the kind of relationship, rival and mentor rolled into one, that shaped how Van de Vyver thinks about competition itself: fierce on the course, warm off it.

Not every relationship survived her rise as smoothly. Midway through junior school, her father's job forced a family move from Johannesburg to Cape Town, and Van de Vyver does not pretend it was painless.

'I had a bit of a falling out with my good friend at that stage,' she says plainly. But there is no bitterness in how she tells it now, just the matter-of-fact resilience of someone who has learned to treat upheaval as opportunity. 'I took it as a new chapter in my life.'

The Western Province girls, she says, welcomed her instantly into a junior squad that trained together every weekend, and the friendships that formed now sit alongside the ones she left behind.

Her golf swing went through its own upheaval around the same time. Coached from age six by Darren Witter at Randpark, Van de Vyver hit a plateau in her early teens, the kind every serious junior eventually confronts.

'You sort of hit a ceiling at some point, especially if you're with the same coach from a really young age, and you're struggling with the swing and it's just not clicking.'

At 11, she and her father made the call to move on, landing with Hendrik Buhrmann at Eagle Canyon. The impact was immediate and, by her telling, a little flattering.

'He was probably the first coach to say, 'you know what, you've got something special.' He said if he could be reborn, he'd want to have my swing.'

Years and a province later, Buhrmann remains her coach, their sessions now conducted online from Cape Town with monthly catch-ups when he passes through Somerset West.

Her breakthrough run to the SA Women's Amateur final reads like a compressed lesson in tournament golf: a personal-best 68 in the opening round that briefly rattled her ('Oh my gosh, I'm here, I'm doing this'), a chastening 74 the next day, then a score of 70 that left her, by her own count, the lowest she has ever gone in a tournament.

Match play brought wins over two of the country's top-ranked women and an unfamiliar sensation entirely: crying with relief after surviving a 20th-hole thriller. 'I did not expect to make it that far,' she says. 'I thought, you know what, this is all just a fever dream.'

She lost eventually on the 17th, and turned the defeat into a technical fix on the spot: her uphill chip is now hit higher, a lesson learned the hard way after coming up short on the same hole in both rounds.

Composure, she insists, is manufactured rather than inherited, built from a father who studied psychology and a mother who stays calm under any pressure. Her go-to tool these days is box breathing, tweaked by where she finds herself.

'In Cape Town I'll hold it for four seconds instead of three, like in Joburg, since the air is a lot thicker down here.'

The next 18 months point toward America, college scouting, and, almost as an aside, a father-daughter HYROX competition for fun.

The golf ambitions are bigger but softly stated, filtered through the player she watches most closely.

'I've always loved Nelly Korda's personality. She just sort of lets what happens, happen.'

At 16, still finishing her schooling between rounds, Kaitlyn van de Vyver seems to be doing exactly the same.