LaHa Thriving on East Coast

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — When she’s on Grounds, University of Virginia golfer Jaclyn LaHa is a long way from home—nearly 3,000 miles—but she has plenty of company in that regard.

Her teammates at UVA include players from Sweden, Canada and Australia, as well as from Florida, Texas, North Carolina and New York. For the local perspective, LaHa can talk to Elsie MacCleery, a graduate of Western Albemarle High School in nearby Crozet.

“You see a lot of different cultures, just within the team,” said LaHa, a rising senior from Pleasanton, Calif., in the Bay Area. “So it's really cool to be friends with so many different types of people who interact with people so differently. It’s really fun to be together as a group and then also just to talk with them one-on-one.”

When she began looking at colleges, LaHa had two priorities. She wanted a school with a strong academic reputation and a good golf program (and facilities). UVA checked both boxes, and LaHa meshed well with the players on the team when she visited. It didn’t hurt, either, that head coach Ria Scott also grew up in the Bay Area.

“When she’s talking about where she’s practicing, I can relate to the courses and the facilities and the drive up [Interstate] 680 or [Interstate] 580 in that area,” Scott said. “So that was an instant connection point for us. It sure helps when you can fully relate to where somebody is from.”

LaHa has been in Northern California since the NCAA Championships concluded in late May, but “whenever I'm back in Charlottesville it kind of makes me feel not so far away from home,” she said, “because there's someone from my area.”

As a junior golfer, LaHa earned All-America honors. Her talent wasn’t the only thing that made Scott want her at UVA.

“One thing that I appreciated about Jaclyn’s junior golf schedule is she played anywhere and everywhere,” Scott said. “She played so much up and down the East Coast, I was just really impressed with her adaptability, her ability to travel, her willingness to travel. I think that’s paying off, and that familiarity with the East Coast in her tournament scheduling as a junior golfer made coming to Virginia a much more viable option.”

An economics major who’s minoring in entrepreneurship, LaHa has been in the Wahoos’ lineup since her freshman year, when she had two top-10 finishes in and placed 20^th at the ACC championships. She recorded two more top-10 finishes in 2024-25, including one at the Chattanooga Classic, where she was runner-up.

Her breakthrough as a Cavalier came this spring. LaHa finished in the top 10 at six tournaments, including the Terps Invitational, which she won in April in College Park, Md.

“I think getting the win at Maryland for Jaclyn was so big for her confidence,” Scott said, “because she had finished runner-up a number of times in her career. So just to be able to close that out was a big confidence-booster for her.”

In the postseason, LaHa placed 11^th at the ACC tournament and tied for 23^rd at the NCAA Championships in Carlsbad, Calif., where she advanced to the fourth and final round of stroke play. She received All-America honorable mention.

“I was happy with how I approached the tournaments and mentally got through them,” LaHa said. “I wasn't as happy with how I finished nationals. I didn't finish those last six holes of the individual on the fourth day very well, but overall, if you’d told me where I would be placed before even starting postseason, I think I would have been happy with my scores and just the placement overall.”

With a lineup that included no seniors, the Cavaliers tied for 18th at NCAAs. For freshmen Remi Bacardi, Miranda Lu and MacCleery, it was their first time on the college game’s biggest stage.

“I’m really proud of how my team competed,” LaHa said.

The NCAA Championships will be held in Carlsbad again in 2027, and “I think that next year we're going to be coming to it a lot more comfortable with how the course is going to be playing,” LaHa said. “So we’ll have some good goals for next year.”

Carlsbad hosted the NCAA Championships in each of LaHa’s first two seasons, too, and “you get such an advantage competitively if you've already seen it,” she said. “So this year I knew what I needed to do on every hole. I knew where to hit it. I knew how this pin is going to be playing in a tournament round.”

LaHa ended her third year with a stroke average of 71.15, the lowest in program history for a single season. Former UVA star Amanda Sambach held the previous record (71.31).

“I was really excited,” LaHa said. “I didn't really know that that was going to be a program record until it came out. I was just focused on having a good tournament individually or a good day or whatever. But I was really proud of myself just with the process that it took to get there. One of my goals going into this year was to lower my scoring average, so it was really fun to see the steps I took to get there pay off.”

Carlsbad is in Southern California, near San Diego, and LaHa’s parents flew there from the Bay Area to watch her compete in the NCAAs. She stayed on the West Coast when the tournament ended and focused on rehabilitating the high ankle sprain she sustained when she missed a step and fell down some stairs in February.

LaHa missed one tournament about spraining her ankle but played through the injury for the rest of the season.

“She wanted to come back for the team quickly and she knew the team needed her, and I don’t know that she had time to fully heal,” Scott said.

LaHa's summer schedule begins with the Women’s Western Amateur, which starts Monday in the Chicago suburb of Elmhurst, Ill. Later this month she’ll play in a qualifier for the U.S. Women’s Amateur. Then comes her fourth year at UVA, where she’s become a cornerstone of the women’s golf program.

“There are no surprises with Jaclyn,” Scott said. “What you see is what you get with her, and she is as sweet and as honest and as kind and as well-intended as she comes off in the first two minutes of any conversation.

“I think that’s what I’ve appreciated about coaching her the most. I can obviously say that for so many of my players, because I’ve been really, really lucky with the players I’ve had at UVA, but you never have to doubt that she’s doing what she needs to do behind the scenes for the program, and she’s just a real team player.”

LaHa wasn’t sure what awaited her in Charlottesville when she left home in 2023, but she’s loved her UVA experience.

“I've gotten to meet so many new people,” she said, “and I think it's a different environment than what I'm used to. I’ve found new hobbies and tried things that I haven't tried before in the Bay Area, because I've lived here my whole life. Also, just being on my own, away from my parents, was a really big thing, because it’s like a six-hour plane ride, so I don't get to go home that often.

“Being on my own, it was hard for me at first, just because sometimes you're so busy with golf and everything that it's hard to meet up with friends and all that stuff. But learning to be more independent and kind of find things to do on my own was, it was cool to see. I think I kind of grew myself.”

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