Paige Spiranac Shares Candid Explanation For Why She Gave Up On Her Professional Golf Career

Popular social media influencer Paige Spiranac is a way better golfer than most people out there. It’s why she feels qualified to give out golf advice on her social media channels and tries to grow the game so much.

In college, she was named First-Team All-Mountain West during her sophomore season at San Diego State. Paige followed that up by being named Second-Team All-Mountain West in her junior year.

In her senior season, Spiranac helped San Diego State win the first Mountain West Conference Championship in school history.

If she had stopped playing right there she would have accomplished more in golf than probably 99 percent of us who play the sport.

After college, Spiranac went on to compete on the Cactus Tour and actually won a tournament in her third start – the only title of her professional career.

In 2016, Paige Spiranac attempted to earn her LPGA Tour card, but unfortunately fell short. That led to Spiranac deciding to halt that pursuit and focus on her burgeoning career as a golf influencer on social media.

“From the first golf ball I ever hit, I dedicated everything I had to being a pro golfer,” Spiranac revealed on her Playing A Round With Paige podcast this week.

“I was homeschooled. I practiced every single day, morning until night. It was my only goal. I was a highly ranked junior golfer and then at 18 I had to make the decision to go to college or turn pro.”

Spiranac and her family decided she would go to college.

“So many growing pains,” Paige explained. “I was burnt out of, I wouldn’t say golf, just dedicating my life to something and not really seeing the results. With gymnastics, it was hard because I was fighting injuries and then with golf — golf is such an interesting sport because you can work out, eat right, practice and still not achieve your goals. That was something for me that I just couldn’t wrap my head around.

“It also went against everything that my parents ever told me because I come from two athletes. They always said, ‘If you put the work in and you dedicate your life to something, you will be successful.’ But that just wasn’t happening with golf and I was driving myself crazy because I felt like I should be achieving at a much higher level. … I had everything to be a world class golfer, but I just couldn’t put it together and I didn’t know why. It was driving me actually insane.”

Related: Paige Spiranac’s Net Worth, How She Makes Her Money, And Why She’s So Famous

“I just got to the point where I just stopped caring. I wanted to have more of a social life. I wanted to have fun. I was tired of dedicating my life to something and just not seeing the result. So when I was playing at SDSU, I just lost my desire for it.”

After college, while working as an assistant coach at San Diego State, Paige Spiranac started to become well-known on social media. That’s when her life changed for the better.

“I was playing really well and then my whole life flipped upside down,” Spiranac revealed. “I blew up on social media. I didn’t end up going back to be the assistant coach. I didn’t even finish my last semester of college. I never got my degree, which is something that’s so crazy and I’ve never talked about that. I was two credits short of getting my degree.

“… I then got the invite to go play in Dubai. I blew up there. I did one year of playing golf professionally and I was just mentally exhausted. In golf, you fail more than you succeed and I was doing that in the public eye. Everyone was telling me, ‘You should quit. You should give up. You’re not good.’

“All of these things, and I was already dealing with these mental issues of years and years and years of trying so hard and coming up short and I just broke. I honestly cracked. I broke and I just stopped. I said ‘maybe I’ll go back,’ and I’ve never gone back to try and play golf professionally again.”

“It keeps me up at night to be honest because I feel like a failure and it’s really difficult for me to wrap my head around the fact that I never made it — not as a gymnast, not as a tennis player, not as a golfer,” Paige Spiranac admitted. “It’s been hard. It’s really hard because I felt like I could do it and there was just something that was missing.”

“But instead of sitting down and feeling sorry for myself, I picked myself back up and threw myself into my media work. My background of just grinding, hard work has really helped me in my media career, because I work so incredibly hard — and the difference is here, the harder I work, the more successful I’ve become and I think that’s why it’s been a more fulfilling journey for me than professional golf… the outcome is positive.”

That would be a massive understatement. Paige Spiranac reportedly earns around $14,000 for each sponsored Instagram post which has helped grow her net worth to an estimated $3 million.

“If I had the choice to be doing what I’m doing to play on the LPGA Tour, I would probably pick the LPGA Tour because that was just a goal that I’ve always wanted to achieve and it was a dream of mine — and I wish I could’ve check that off before I went over into doing media work full-time,” Spiranac revealed. “But that’s not how life works.”