Around the World with Adit: Jocelyn Chee
It is always great to keep your options open. For Jocelyn Chee, being flexible with her plans opened her a path to greater heights.
Jocelyn was raised in the small city of Kedah in Malaysia.
Before she started swinging the golf club, she used to hit shuttlecocks with a racket.
That's right, she was a badminton player before a golfer.
With legends like Lee Chong Wei bannering its flag, badminton is a very popular sport in Malaysia and Jocelyn walked on that path paved by the legends.
Jocelyn's sister, Evelyn Chee, reached the national level in badminton, and while she practiced, Jocelyn would be spectating courtside before picking up the racket herself at the age of seven.
"We have a district badminton club called 'Kuala Muda Badminton Association', I play with them along with my friends," she said.
One of her best memories when playing badminton was finishing second in the internal state championship with her favorite doubles partner representing Kedah.
But despite having already played badminton for years, it seemed like Jocelyn's parents, Chee Chang and Lim See Hoon, did not want to narrow their daughter's options.
"The age of 10 was when I first picked up a golf club."
Her parents brought her to the driving range solely to work on her swing every night.
During that time, Jocelyn juggled school, badminton, and golf daily.
She said that school starts at 7 in the morning and ends at 1 o'clock. After school, she had one and a half hours to rest before the three-hour badminton practice begins at 3 o'clock. After badminton, in the evening, she goes to the driving range to practice her swing from 6 p.m. to 7 or 7:30.
It may seem like a lot, but when asked how she felt during that time, she said with a smile that it was not that big of a deal.
"Studying is studying, then badminton is the same routine that I have been doing for the last five years, and then golf came in and since I was a beginner, I was just hitting without caring," she said. "It wasn't stressful, but it was physically tiring."
She did this routine for two years before, at the age of 12, a tragedy happened in Jocelyn's family. Indirectly affected her athletic career.
Evelyn was training to get into the Malaysian Badminton National Team when she suffered a bad knee injury that stays with her to this day.
Seeing this, Chee Chang and Lim See Hoon realized how steep the road is in Malaysian badminton, so they slowly encouraged Jocelyn to focus more on golf.
"I was really young, and, in my head, badminton was the only way," she said. "I can kind of tell that they were steering me to golf without telling me."
She said at first, she did not want to stop playing badminton but then the batch that she used started with, including her doubles partner, started to quit badminton. From then on, Jocelyn did not enjoy it as much and eventually stopped playing.
"The three-year transition (in quitting badminton) was fine. I can still play whenever I want to."
Back to golf, turning the time back to when Jocelyn was 12. She started getting proper golf training on the golf course and competed in her first tourney.
"I did horrible," she said. "But it was at that first tourney that I realized that golf is really fun."
On that same year, Jocelyn got into an academy called Maybank Junior Program with 10 other players from all over Malaysia.
"Four times a year during school holidays we would gather for an intense one-week training with a coach that they provide," she said.
Outside of that, she would practice with a private technical coach or independently. Yes, on her own.
Jocelyn said she only had lessons with her technical coach once a week and practiced on her own for the rest. It takes a special kind of dedication to work their craft independently, especially at a young age.
"My parents are the kind of people that (says) if you want to do it, then do the best you can in it," she said. "They are really supportive of me, driving me to court every day."
Her mother would accompany her during practices.
Practicing alone is something that Jocelyn had to do since her high school does not have a golf team. Lucky enough, one of her peers in the Maybank Junior Program goes to the same school, keeping her family and her close to the golfing scene of Malaysia.
"In high school, school starts at 8 a.m., and it ends at 2:30. After that, I have the whole afternoon for golf," Jocelyn said.
Malaysia has a well-structured competition stage for every sport.
Each year, sports competition starts at the internal district level, where athletes compete for their school. The top-three finishers of the internal district will represent the area at the internal state level. Then the top-three in the internal state will represent the state at the national level.
Jocelyn made it to nationals in her last three years of high school.
When she graduated high school, she represented Kedah in Malaysia's biggest sporting event, Sukma Games, in June 2016.
Sukma Games is a biennial multi-sport event where athletes compete, representing their state or district.
"Although our team did not do well, I remember having one really good round at Sukma," she said. "A record that I probably broke the next month."
Jocelyn admitted that after Sukma, a lot of stuff happened in golf career and her performance improved rapidly.
A week after Sukma, she joined the Sime Darby Training Camp, where she practiced with other golfers and played in multiple tourneys for a month.
"During that time there was a tournament where I believe I hit my first under-par," she said.
While at the training camp, she got the chance to watch a tourney affiliated with the Ladies Professional Golf Association.
"There were really good players playing on that tour and watching them made me realize that I want to do this (golf) more."
She knows she wants to play more golf, but she also need to continue her studies to the higher education.
Jocelyn visited a couple of universities, but there are no college golf teams in Malaysia. So, staying in Malaysia was not an option to keep playing golf.
"I remember someone mentioned college golf (in America) and I said, 'let's try that'."
"So I went through the whole SAT and ACT process," she said with a laugh.
She and her parents agreed that it was the best choice to keep playing golf while getting a degree.
In the fall of 2016, Jocelyn started the most straightforward method to get herself recruited, emailing coaches.
She said she couldn't remember the exact number of schools she reached out to, but it is in the range of 15 to 30 schools.
In the end, she chose to play for California Baptist University.
When asked why she chose CBU, she said that Coach Marc Machado showed great interest in not only recruiting her but also in getting to know her.
"He sent me a long email explaining who he is," she said. "Coach Marc really wanted to know me. We had an interview and I felt pretty good about how enthusiastic and driven he is."
Fast forward to August of 2017, Jocelyn traveled to the States with her mother and sister. Aside from the intense summer heat of Southern California, Jocelyn remembered how much of an introvert she was when she first met Coach Marc.
"To this day, he would make fun of how silent I was when I first came," she said. "I would look to my sister all the time to make her do all the talking."
Despite being introverted, Jocelyn did not have much of an issue when fitting into CBU and the United States.
CBU's golf team was a small team of seven players in 2017, and back then, three out of the seven were international students from Asia.
"I was lucky," she said.
Jocelyn recalls how the then team captain, Erica Wang, ensured that she settled in well. Helping her with the moving and keeping her company.
Now, Jocelyn is the team captain in charge of her peers.
After five years at CBU, outside of improving as a player, she believed she had improved her ability to work with different people. The responsibility that comes with being a captain made Jocelyn think more about how other people think differently.
The golf team is her favorite part of CBU, and she cherishes the time she spends with her teammates, be it for studying or simply getting food.
While competing at the WAC, she enjoyed how the competition had made her grow as a player. But competition aside, she said she was very excited when Sam Houston joined the league as she is close friends with Bearkats' own Zulaikah Nasser.
"She is a little younger than me, but we are childhood friends," Jocelyn said.
Now, after her last college golf tourney and coming to the end of her graduate studies, she said she is looking to go home to Malaysia and play more golf.
Her goal is to play in Qualifying Schools to get a cut in the professional tourneys.
Her short-term goal is to play on a Thailand or Taiwan tour. Eventually, she aims to break the big tourneys of South Korea and Japan.
Jocelyn earned First team All WAC honors after placing seventh individually at the WAC Women's Golf Championship, last week.
