OLEAN, N.Y. — Kaylin Kline saved perhaps her best shot of the day for last.
After a big drive, the 16-year-old hit a dazzling approach from 70 yards out, landing it 10 yards past the pin on the No. 18 green at Bartlett Country Club and spinning it back to about two feet for a tap-in birdie.
Klein had already held a narrow lead in this first-round matchup of the 13th annual Bergreen Junior Match Play Championship, but this was the shot that sealed her 2-up victory over Andy Rohrs.
“That second shot, she hit one of the nicest shots I ever saw,” tournament director Jim Brady noted. “If you talk to her, mention that, because it was an awesome second shot she hit, just a great shot to win the match.”
Last Friday, Kline won the No. 8/9 matchup before taking Smethport’s Connor Alfieri, one of the area’s top young golfers, to the 16th hole in the Bergreen quarterfinals. Six days earlier, she became the first female to win a flight at the Southwestern-New York Northwestern-Pennsylvania Men’s Amateur, earning a 2&1 triumph in the Sixth Flight. Before then, she’d climbed the ranks in the Penn-York Junior Golf League, vaulting from the girls division to the top boys division and finishing 18th overall with a 91.33 scoring average.
In the last several weeks, Kline, a Holland native, has burst onto the golf scene in the Southern Tier. Three years ago, she almost certainly wouldn’t have envisioned being near that scene at all.
IN AUGUST 2017, Kline, then an eighth-grader at Pioneer, was diagnosed with hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy, a rare condition in which the heart muscle becomes abnormally thick and has difficulty pumping blood.
Kline was a budding sports standout, having started for both the varsity girls basketball and soccer teams as a seventh-grader. That fall, she was going to start at striker on a loaded Pioneer team opposite senior star Meghan Root, who’d go on to be named Big 30 Player of the Year. Two days into the season, however, she was told that she’d no longer be able to play the high-intensity sports she’d participated in her entire life.
It was an admittedly devastating blow.
In retrospect, though, it was also a bit of a blessing; it was from that doctor’s appointment that a new passion began: playing golf.
“When I first got diagnosed, they told me that I would never be able to play basketball or soccer, pretty much any other sport, again,” Kline recalled. “So then we were trying to think of something that I could do. My dad said, ‘what about golf,’ and the doctor said, ‘yeah, you could play golf,’ then maybe two months later I set up my first golf lesson, having no idea. I’d never swung a golf club in my life.
“That was my first time.”
KLINE BEGAN working with Marlene Davis, an LPGA club professional considered one of the top golf instructors in the country. Much like with other sports, she quickly found she had a natural ability.
Kline had a strong first season after transferring to St. Mary’s-Lancaster for her freshman year. Last fall, after returning to Holland, she qualified for the Section 6 Championship as a member of the Holland/East Aurora co-op, earning the No. 8 ranking before the spring event was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
For the rising high school junior, though, golf was more than just a game she’d gotten good at — more than just a way to fill the void in athletics brought on by her heart condition — it was a coping mechanism.
“Golf really helped me a lot,” she said. “I knew that I could never have golf taken away from me, I would have it forever. That’s why I thought I would put time into it, to try to get as good as I can.
“I still have some time left where I can play (in high school). I always wanted to play a Division I sport in college; golf was another way I could do it, so I wanted to put the work in so I could still be a Division I athlete.”
PRIOR TO her sophomore year, Kline, the middle of three talented sisters, received some unexpected, but welcomed news: her heart had reshaped itself to the point where, with limitations, she could play her other sports again.
It was nothing short of a miracle.
Kline helped the Dutch to a 9-8 record in soccer. Alongside sisters Myla, a senior All-Western New York selection, and Kierra, an eighth-grader, she keyed Holland to a dramatic victory over Franklinville in the Section 6 Class C championship game in girls basketball last March, a game won by Kierra’s buzzer-beating 3-pointer.
Given those restrictions, however, (“she’s still quite medicated,” her father, Jason, noted. “Her heart is governed; she can only go to about 150 beats per minute, while everybody else is around 200), her focus now lies in golf.
In the Week 1 Penn-York stop at Elkdale, Kline fired a 39 from the modified tees, claiming the Girls’ Division I title by 14 strokes. By the end of the tour, she’d qualified for the 16-player Bergreen for the second-straight year.
In between, she was just the fifth female to play in the Men’s Am and the first to bring home any hardware.
“I was really nervous going in, and in my first match, I didn’t play very well,” she began of her experience in the Men’s Am, “but then when I got into my flight, I played with some men that were the same age as my dad; they made it really fun and really comforting, and they were so happy that there was a girl playing in it. They thought it was the coolest thing and they had all their friends come and watch me, so it was really nice to have such a big gallery watching me.”
She added: “It was a lot of fun; that was a really good experience to be able to win a tournament like that.”
MUCH LIKE her sisters (Myla is now at Division II Malone in Canton, Ohio, for basketball), Kaylin is an ultra-competitive athlete. Part of what stoked the fire this summer, she acknowledged, was her ability to compete with, and sometimes beat, the boys.
Of her 4&3 Bergreen quarterfinal loss to Alfieri, she said, “I ended up playing really well that day, actually, but it was just so hard for me to beat him because he parred every single hole. I birdied four holes that day, two with him, and we tied a lot of holes.”
Mostly, though, she wants to see where golf might take her.
Considering she only first picked up a club fewer than three years ago, and how good she’s already become in that time, her ceiling likely has yet to be determined.
“I would like to be a pro … if I’m good enough, I would love to be,” she said. “Since my family owns a golf course (Jason co-owns Rolling Hills in Chaffee), I play every single day. And since I was little, I just wanted to be a Division I athlete so bad, and since I couldn’t do that in basketball, I’d like to do that in golf.”
