Leah Rafii started at Burke Lake Golf Course.
As a high school student looking for a sport to focus on, Leah Rafii was trying out golf on the Robinson High School team at Twin Lakes Golf Course when a huge thunderstorm hit and the coach tried to get them all back to the clubhouse. It was a memorable experience for Rafii.
“I remember running through the trees, we all had to run with our golf clubs,” she said. This experience didn’t sway her from the sport, so she took it up and now has spent the last summer in a USGA Internship at Pinehurst Country Club in North Carolina.
“I’m wrapping up my last week, it’s been amazing,” she said.
This summer she started as a member of the inaugural class of the Pathways Launch program, the 24 participants gathered at Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades, Calif. for the U.S. Women’s Open. The class was selected from over 1,000 applicants and represent individuals from a variety of backgrounds, their information said. The program places each participant across 10 organizations across the country for their summer internship.
In addition to their summer placements across industry organizations, all interns were on-site at the U.S. Women’s Open from Thursday, June 4 to Sunday, June 7, participating in a variety of career development programming events.
Early Golf Days
It all started on the Burke Lake par-3 golf course with her father and brother, learning the sport on a local level. She went to Robinson High School and joined the golf team where she was a volunteer coach at her local First Tee chapter, played on the girls’ varsity and co-ed varsity teams and was named the girls’ captain during her senior year. From there she went on to the University of South Carolina where she’s going into her third year on the golf team, but has her eye on world travel first.
This fall Leah Rafii’s doing an internship in Austria, and then on to Munich in the spring where she might get a visitor. “My mom likes to travel, she will definitely come visit me,” she said.
At home in Burke, her golf interest was spurred even further by all the golf matches on television she watched with her father.
Fairfax County High School golf is part of the Virginia High School League sports program which is defined as an organization of the public and non-boarding high schools in the Commonwealth of Virginia which join with the expressed written approval of their local school boards. Its organizational home is located in Charlottesville, and it loosely follows USGA rules.
In Los Angeles, the summer started out at Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades, Calif. for the U.S. Women’s Open.