Ella Ofstedahl Makes the Most of Her Fifth Year in Statesboro

STATESBORO – The scene was like something out of a nightmare. The one where you need to run but your legs won’t work or the one where you’re swimming to the surface, but something keeps pulling you back under the water.

Georgia Southern women’s golf fifth-year senior Ella Ofstedahl was loaded down by seven bags - everything she owned from her last four years in the United States – and walking through Heathrow Airport in London last March. She was trying to get through a security gate to reach her parents, who were 100 yards away on the other side. She could not get through the gate with all her stuff, and since it was at the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic, nobody would help her because they were afraid to be near her.

She could see her parents, Darryl and Viv, and they could see her, but they could not reach each other for a long-awaited embrace, the kind a mother and father need to give their only daughter during an ordeal such as this to let each other know it is going to be okay.

After 20 minutes of waiting to get buzzed through security, Ella finally made it to the other side, where her parents had a good laugh and took pictures of their daughter because that’s what the Ofstedahl family does. Then came the hugs and the kisses and the sense of relief.

“I haven't seen them in forever, and obviously, with everything going on, I just wanted to see them,” Ella recalls. “I'm on the phone to them, and I'm like, 'I'm right here,' but no one would help me get through the barrier. It was like landing in an apocalypse-type thing; nobody wanted to be near each other. They came rushing through to help me, and they laughed at me first because I'm pushing seven bags and got the pictures in and then gave me a hug.”

Their daughter was safe, and they were together and nothing else mattered. None of them knew what the future held, but Ella was certain she had played her last round of college golf.

A native of the very small village of Shillington, Bedfordshire, in England, Ella started playing golf at Mill Green Golf Club at the age of 5. Her older brothers, Sam and Max, liked to play golf, and their little sister wanted to do whatever they did.

“My brothers both played, and my parents played, and there was no way I was going to be the one not playing,” she says. “They would play, and I would be the one who pulled out the flag all the time, and I just got sick of it. I was like, 'I want to go and hit. My brothers are. Why can't I?' I've always liked to follow my brothers’ lead.”

Mill Green had a par-3 course and a fantastic junior program, and Ella and her brothers would hop into the car every Saturday and make the 30-minute drive to participate. She grew to love the game and began competing in club tournaments at age 13. Tournaments ran from May to September, which complemented the school year nicely, and heated covered hitting bays provided a place to practice, nearly year-round. As she progressed, playing collegiate golf in the United States went from being an option to a possibility to a desire.

“I think I started looking at schools when I was 15 or 16,” she says. “It was always in the back of my mind that I wanted to come to America. You just don't have this kind of opportunity back home with the weather and the facilities and what it's like over here.”

Ella and Darryl began reaching out to college coaches in the United States and studied up on the requirements of gaining admittance to American Universities, one of which they discovered was taking the SAT. Ella used a hand-me-down SAT prep book to study, but taking the real test was still an eye-opener.  

"I did not appreciate that it would be a five-hour exam of sitting in a room looking at words that I just didn't know existed,” she says with a laugh. “That was my intro to America, if you will, and I quickly ran out that the SAT was impossible for near everybody who took it, American or not.”

Qualifying for the 2014 British Girls Amateur Championship in Ireland cemented that she was a good enough player to earn a college scholarship. The tournament is comprised of the best amateur girls from all over Europe, and she was told 30 Division I college coaches would be there to watch, one of whom wound up being Georgia Southern coach Emily Kuhfeld. Ella was keenly aware of how big a deal it was but seeing a crowd of coaches gathered around the first tee was still a surprise.

"I just wasn't expecting it,” she says. “I knew they would be there, but it's just something else when you put your tee in the ground and you turn around, and there's 15 people with - it's almost like a scoresheet in their hands - and I'm like, ‘Ooh, hope I hit a good one,’ which I did not, I seem to remember."

She started looking into Georgia Southern online and planned a visit to the States with Darryl. They flew into Atlanta, and she visited a state university there before traveling to Statesboro and what would become her future home.

“Honestly, Georgia Southern took my heart from the get-go, and I think I always had my mind set on being here as soon as I looked into it and found out what it was about,” she says.  “What’s not to like about the campus, and the facilities we have here for golf are some of the best I've ever seen anywhere so we're very lucky.”

Ella qualified for the British Girls Amateur again in 2015 - this time in Scotland - and advanced to match play. A few months later, she signed with Georgia Southern during the Eagles' inaugural season. There was a bit of culture shock at the beginning of her time in Statesboro, which made for some unforgettable moments.

“I did get asked by one of my classmates in my freshman year if it took me a long time to learn English before I came here,” she recalls with a laugh. “That was actually one of my first experiences in being at University in America. Because we're in a small Southern area, I think a lot of people when I first came here hadn't really met anyone from England before, so it was really new for them and new for me. It was fun and exciting to interact with each other and learn some different stuff.”

Her start on the golf course was also a bit nervy, but she became more comfortable there as well. After one top-20 finish as a freshman, she has posted 25 in the last four years with three victories, including Sun Belt Medalist honors in 2019, where she is still the defending champion.

The emergency team meeting came shortly after the Augusta Invitational was canceled last March. The Georgia Southern campus was closing, and Kuhfeld wanted to get the girls together to lay out the plan for the coming weeks as best she could. Following the meeting, Ella said goodbye to her teammates, thinking it would be a short-term separation.

“I remember driving off and saying goodbye to all the girls, and they were kind of looking at me, and I was like ‘Oh, I'll see you all in a week or two weeks. I'll be back. It's spring break - go spend time with your families. We'll catch up, it's all good,’” she says. “And we just gave each other a hug and didn't really think much of it.”

Ella went to Atlanta to stay with her longtime boyfriend, Taylor. As the month of March progressed, she wrestled with the conundrum that perplexed a lot of international students. Should I stay or should I go?

“There was just this window of time that if you didn't leave, you didn't know if you were going to get back,” she says. “You didn't know when borders were going to close. It was a crazy, crazy two weeks where everything was up in the air and you just didn't know what the right way to do it was. I either stay here and who knows when I'll be coming back or I come back to England, and I don't know when I'll see people on this side again. It was all a very stressful process.”

Ultimately, Ella and her parents decided it would be best to get her home. She booked her flight on a Friday to fly out of Atlanta on Sunday and in the interim, she and Taylor drove to Statesboro, packed up her entire room into seven bags that wound up costing over $800 to get on the plane. At the time, she was fairly sure that Georgia Southern and college golf were about to be in her past. As for Taylor?

“I said goodbye to him and everyone else and I was like, 'I don't know when I'll see you again,’” she recollects somberly.

As the world went into lock down mode, golf became an afterthought. Sam and Max also returned home, and the Ofstedahl family thoroughly enjoyed their time together. Ella continued taking classes online and forging ahead on her degree while reconciling in her mind the abrupt end to her college career. She had already made the decision that a professional golf career was not something she wanted to pursue. 

“I’ve enjoyed being in college and playing competitively, but I think you kind of hit a point where you know,” she says.  “And I definitely hit that point, and I just enjoy it for what it is and the experience that it gives me. I can always say I've done this but playing professionally really isn't in the cards for me anymore.”

She followed a little bit of the news regarding the NCAA on Twitter never thinking another year of eligibility would be possible. She would graduate in May with a degree in sport management, start looking for a full-time job when the economy began to rebound, and that was that.

“It honestly didn't even enter my mind that I might come back for another year,” she says. “I think I was so sad by the way it all ended, but I felt like I still had a great time and a great experience. I thought, ‘It's sad, but I guess it's just my time to be done.’ During that time, I wasn't thinking of going anywhere.”

On March 30, the NCAA announced all spring sport student-athletes would get an extra year. Kuhfeld’s call came shortly thereafter, and after a great sales pitch by Kuhfeld and a lot of discussion and consternation within the Ofstedahl clan, Ella began to warm up to the idea of another year in the States. She announced her return to the Eagles May 11.

“The more I thought about it, the more I just thought I can play golf and have fun with the girls and be there for them, I can get another degree - which I love psychology and it's so interesting to me - and him (Taylor) and I are in the same country, which is a plus,” she says. “For me it was kind of like, 'Do I struggle here and who knows when I'll get a job or what kind of job I'll get or do I go back and have another year of traveling and two degrees?' and it almost became a no-brainer at the end of it. I was very adamant that I wasn't going to play golf in college ever again, but the more I thought about it, the more I just thought it's the right thing to do. It's just the right time for something like this and the right move to make.”

The planning on how to get back over the pond became quite an ordeal in its own right. She had always flown back the first week of August and booked a flight early for Aug. 1, but the U.S. border was closed. Whether she would ever actually board that plane became the question of the summer.

“It was like radio silence - there was just nothing,” Ella recalls.  “No flights going out of the airports and no updates on anything. We didn't hear anything until the second or third week in July. It was stressful because I didn't even know if I could leave the country. It was a very select group of people who were able to fly in.”

As the virus spread rapidly throughout the U.S., trepidation set in for the family. Ella was safe where she was, and they were about to send her into the unknown. She is young and healthy – a Division I athlete – but the bottom line is that nobody really knows how the virus will affect them until they get it. Viv started having second thoughts.

“It was scary - not that any country had the right way to deal with anything - but just because the U.S. is so much bigger, it (the virus) was just traveling like absolute wildfire,” says Ella. “We weren't sure what it was going to be like. I said to my mom, ‘If I can go, I'm going.’”

She packed just enough to get her through the next 10 months – two bags this time – boarded the plane and flew back over the Atlantic. The next hurdle was to avoid getting the virus on a campus of over 27,000 students from all over the world.

“I remember the first couple of months, I was scared of doing anything,” she says. “It was scary for my parents because they can't do anything from where they are. If I got sick over here, hopefully I would be ok, but you have absolutely no idea how it would affect you and then you have things like hospital bills. It would probably bankrupt my parents if I got sick over here. So just stuff like that you have to kind of think about being an international student.”

The Eagle women’s golf team played two events in the fall, and Ofstedahl took medalist honors in the second, the Mercer Invitational Nov. 10. Being back in the same state as Taylor, who lives in Atlanta, as well as having another season to compete with her teammates had already made all the trials and tribulations of the previous eight months worthwhile. Getting back in the winner’s circle made the journey even better.

“The fall was up and down with my golf, but getting that win, that was special and kind of reminded me just how special it is to be over here and compete with this team and represent the school,” Ella says. “I love doing that, and having that opportunity again was fun. Yeah, it was definitely worth it.”

In the spring, Ella added top-20 finishes to her resume at the Strutter Gus Invitational – the Eagles’ home tournament - the Red Rocks Invitational and the Chattanooga Classic and now turns her sights on finally getting to defend her Sun Belt Championship.

The Eagles will compete in the event April 18-20 at LPGA International in Daytona Beach, Florida, with daily coverage on ESPN+. She says confidence is the key to a successful tournament for both herself and her teammates.

“We’ll be successful if we believe in ourselves and trust that we're ready and trust that we have the shots because we've been working hard in the weeks leading up to it and keep a smile on our face,” she says.

A second bachelor's degree - this time in psychology - will be earned in May, and she has a flight scheduled back to England shortly after graduation. This time, she will have a travel buddy in Taylor, who plans to stay and seek employment in England. For now, her focus is putting a cherry on the sundae that is already the best four-year career in the history of the Georgia Southern women’s golf program.

“Trying to end it on a high,” she says. “But I'm just going in there to enjoy it. I think you learn as you go on to try and take the pressure off yourself and just enjoy it. Know that you're prepared, know that we've put in the hours, know that we've put in the effort and the hard work and just go out there and enjoy it. Enjoy being out on a beautiful day and playing with a team that we love and being around each other. When you do that, the golf will hopefully take care of itself, and we'll get some good results.”