Shieh's Dilemma: What to Do With Too Much Talent

At some point very soon, Karolyne Shieh is going to have to choose.

The waking up at 5 a.m two, three times a week to drive from her home in Carlisle to perfect her double axel at the rink in Acton, the groundhog day-like practice schedule at the range, the never-ending drives to regional tournaments, not to mention keeping up her GPA and preparing for the SATs; at this pace, the balancing act will soon become too much to handle.

Shieh has a problem that most 16-year-old athletes would kill for — she's too talented for her own good.

This spring Shieh shot a 74 to win the MIAA girls individual golf championships, and qualified for the U.S Public Link Championships at Bandon Dunes in Oregon, where she competed against the top amateur and collegiate players in the country, including Cheyenne Woods, Tiger's niece.

The sophomore at Concord-Carlisle did all of this while keeping up with her figure skating training at Nashoba Valley Olympia. She's already mastered so-called "doubles," and is moving on to "triples," meaning three rotations in the air before landing gracefully on one foot. Shieh skated at U.S Junior Nationals a couple years ago, and plans to compete at the New England championships in September.

But this talented 16-year-old knows that she can't keep up this blistering pace, not without sacrificing even more than she has already. She wants to go to the beach with her friends, attend sleepovers, go out for ice cream; you know, normal high school kid stuff. 

Some time to sleep would be nice too.

"I know that I'm going to have to choose one sport soon," Shieh said. "But I love both! I guess I've been procrastinating for a long time."

A Family Affair

Procrastinating? Please. The word is not in the Shieh family vocabulary. Shieh's mother, Tanni Kuo, does a balancing act of her own every day. Karolyne just turned 16 and doesn't have her license to drive yet, so Kuo serves as, in her own words, "the family taxi driver," shuttling her daughter to and from golf and skating practice on a daily basis. 

Kuo does all of that while managing her own technology business. She still she finds time to go for a run every day, just as she has since she got her P.H.D at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nearly 20 years ago.

"It's really hard, balancing their time and my time, and cooking time and sleeping time," Kuo said. "I work really early in the morning, and really late at night."

It was Kuo who signed Shieh and her younger brother Christopher up to be volunteer sign bearers at the U.S Public Links Tournament at Red Tail Golf Club in Devens three years ago, when Karolyne was 12 and Chris was 9. 

Shieh had been ballet dancing and doing gymnastics since she was 4 or 5, and started skating not long after that. But as she watched the best amateur female golfers in the country go at it, she had a realization.

"She saw the college girls play, and said 'Hey, I want to play that game,'" Kuo said.

Shieh soon began taking lessons at Stow Acres Country Club, alongside Chris, who originally was more interested in the game than his sister was, she says. Golf was at first a hobby, a fun way to bond with her brother.

Three years later, what would have seemed a pipe dream, to qualify for and just barely miss the cut at the very same tournament where she once held signs, was a reality.

For someone with prodigious natural talent and a dogged work ethic, pipe dreams are not pipe dreams at all.

The Girl With the Merry-Go-Round Swing

Tom Giles sits in his office at Stow Acres in front of a massive flat-screen TV, connected to his computer. On the screen are a series of videos of his students' golf swings, as well as swings of various top-level pros, which he often split-screens for comparison.

Giles pulls up a slide of the swing of one of his most promising students, 16-year-old Karolyne Shieh.

"She has a unique swing, self-taught," he says. "Her backswing is more flat, like a merry-go-round instead of a ferris wheel, if that makes sense."

If it doesn't, here's a primer: the backswings of great golfers run the gamut from Jim Furyk, who swings his club at an extreme sharp angle nearly over his head on every shot, and Chris Campbell, who takes his swing back at an extreme flat angle, almost tapping his left shoulder blade with the club on every shot.

Shieh's swing is more Campbell than Furyk, flatter than what is traditionally taught, says Giles. But Giles knew better than to mess with someone with such natural talent.

"Other coaches were telling her that she was too flat, but some of the best players in golf history, Ben Hogan for example, had flat swings," Giles said. 

Giles pulls up a split-screen with Shieh's swing on the left, and the swing of Michelle Wie, who as a teenager became the youngest ever winner of the U.S Public Links and who made headlines by playing in men's tournaments on the P.G.A Tour, on the right.

Sure enough, Wie's swing is more textbook, smack in the middle of the Furyk-Cambpell spectrum. But Shieh still has what it takes to follow in Wie's footsteps and play golf for a living someday, says Giles, if she continues her rapid pace of improvement.

"What separates her is her practice habits, which she learned from figure skating," Giles said. "It's that Bobby Knight quote: many people have to will the win, but not many have to will to prepare to win. Karolyne has that, and that trumps everything else."

Having a natural ability to learn things quickly, another result of the years of waking up at sunrise and practicing her figure skating routines, helps too.

"I've been told I'm a fast learner," Shieh said. "Like if someone shows me a way to twist my hips on my swing, I'll pick it up faster than some other people."

A Girl Among Boys

"It's very rare to have a girl on the team," said Concord-Carlisle High School boys golf coach Phil Gibson. "It's an interesting dynamic. But she earned everyone's respect as a committed teammate immediately as a freshman."

Shieh went to a local Montessori school from preschool to eighth grade, where the graduating class was under 10 students. Her first day at Concord-Carlisle was "the most people I had ever seen in one place," she says. 

Concord-Carlisle has no girls golf team, so Shieh decided to try out for the guys team in the fall of her freshman year. She made it as the only girl on a team with 14 boys on it, and has fit in just fine.

"The boys aren't intimidated or anything, they really don't think about it anymore," Gibson said. "It's just 'There goes Karolyne, a really good golfer.'"

It's not like Shieh spends her time warming the bench or getting the boys water or anything; Karolyne spent her sophomore season in the starting lineup, and played as one of the team's top six players in the state championships, says Gibson.

That meant sometimes beating the boys, the mention of which prompts Shieh to flash a wide smile.

"I'm a very competitive person, so yeah, it's more fun to beat the guys," she said.

The moment is a rare glimpse of ego from a teenager who is remarkably humble for someone who has achieved so much at such a young age. But that's just who Shieh is: a bashful, soft-spoken 16-year-old who thinks playing with the best amateurs in the nation was "super cool" and "never thought in a million years" that she'd be a New England golf champion.

Giles thinks Shieh would benefit from setting higher standards for her golf game, and visualizing herself holding up the U.S Public Links trophy, for example.  

"At the beginning of the year she didn't even know where the tournament was," he said, with a chuckle. "I told her to look it up, imagine going there, and imagine not just competing, but winning the whole thing. She can absolutely do it."

For a Teenage Prodigy, the Choice Awaits

Shieh prefers to dwell on immediate goals — she's losing too many strokes on her short game, for example, and wants to make junior nationals in figure skating again — though she knows that someday soon she will have to decide between golf and skating.

It's a sensitive issue for the family. So sensitive in fact, that Kuo asked me not to contact Shieh's skating coach for this story, so as to not "rub salt in the wound."

Kuo thinks that her daughter is leaning towards committing to golf at this point, but says she continues to go back and forth between her two loves.

"It's hard for her, because she enjoys both," Kuo said. "But golf is a more social sport for her, and she gets to play with her younger brother and sister [Gabrielle, 9]."

What's clear is that the current grind will be nearly impossible to maintain. All of the missed trips to the beach with friends, the doing homework, taking naps and eating lunch in the car, the increasing high school workload; it's all starting to swell to a dangerous level.

Karolyne Shieh will choose, and she'll choose soon. But what's also clear is that whatever this teenage prodigy chooses, the rest of the world better get ready.