Amy Olson Retires

LPGA

Amy Olson, the former two-time Minnesota Girls Junior PGA champion who came tantalizingly close to winning two major champiionships, announced her retirement from the LPGA Tour on Wednesday. 

As an amateur, the then-Amy Anderson won virtually every junior title that was available to her. Even though she lived in Oxbow, N.D., she won the Minnesota State Girls Junior PGA title in 2008, and won it again at Stillwater CC and Dellwood the following year. Later that summer, she won the USGA Girls Junior Championship -- at Trump National in Bedminster, N.J. -- earning medalist honors in the stroke-play portion of the tournament and then winning the match-play portion, as well. The Boys Junior winner that year was Jordan Spieth.

In that same year, 2009, she enrolled at North Dakota State University, even though she was not quite 17 years and 2 months old at the time. Despite starting college one year early, she managed to break Julie Inkster's NCAA Division I record of 17 tournament victories by winning 20 times during her four years with the Bison. While she was at it, she  also managed to graduate in 2013 with an accounting major and a 3.97 grade-point average. 

The 5-foot-9-inch, long-hitting Anderson turned professional shortly after graduating and cruised through LPGA Tour Q-School that fall, earning medalist honors in the final stage (Stage II).

In 2017, she became Amy Olson when she married Grant Olson, a former NDSU All-American linebacker who played on three of the Bison's FCS national championship teams. (He set a single-game record by making 29 tackles in a 2012 playoff game against Wofford College.) Olson was a student assistant coach for the Bison in 2014, then spent two years as a graduate assistant at Wyoming. He went from there to Indiana State, where he was the linebackers coach in 2015 and '16, and he was hired to be the linebackers coach at NDSU in 2017.

The next year, Amy had a chance to win one of the LPGA's major titles, the Evian Championship, but she lost by a stroke to Angela Stanford when she double-bogeyed the 72nd hole. 

Two years later (2020), the U.S. Women's Open was moved from mid-summer to mid-December because of the Covid 19 epidemic. Once again, Olson was in contention. She led by two shots with three holes to go, at 2 under for the tournament, and she played those last three holes in even par -- bogey, par, birdie. When you do that in a U.S. Open, you're supposed to win. But A Lin Kim finished birdie-birdie-birdie to snatch the Open crown from Olson's grasp. 

Olson hasn't played regularly on the LPGA Tour for a couple of years, and in January of 2023 she found out that she was pregnant. Despite that, she qualified for the U.S. Women's Open and played in it seven months pregnant, but missed the cut. Looking back on the year, however, missing the cut at the Open seemed insignificant, compared with the arrival on Sept. 15 of Carly Gray Olson.

As it turns out, Olson's departure from the LPGA matches the schedule she envisioned for herself a decade ago when she turned professional. 

"She said she would be out there for 10 years, and that's how long it's been," noted Greg Boner, whose daughter Hailey has been a friend of Olson's since their days as junior golfers and who was a teammate of Olson's at NDSU.

In those 10 years, Olson earned $2,669,569 in official money.

Presumably, there won't be any more of that. But that shouldn't be a problem for the newly expanded Olson family.

"Grant just got a promotion (he will now be the NDSU defensive coordinator, plus linebackers coach)," Boner said. "And Amy's really smart. She's a CPA (Certified Public Accountant), and she won't have a problem finding clients. She's been doing work for some of the other LPGA Tour players for several years."