From left, Makenna Thayer of Battle Mountain, Kaitlyn Gromek of Steamboat Springs, Zoe Barall of Littleton and Katarina Cosby of Steamboat Springs pose after last week’s Colorado 4A girls state golf tournament. Thayer placed fourth overall, Barall sixth, Gromek eighth and Cosby 13th.
Christopher Hoebel/Photo courtesy
Forget the three regular-season tournament wins and back-to-back state championship appearances, Makenna Thayer’s real breakout came last summer.
On a sunny day, the Battle Mountain sophomore shot 75 and beat Vail Country Club owner Kenny Thayer, aka “Dad,” by three strokes.
“She beat me,” said the golfing doyen with a paradoxically proud disgust. After years of regular matches, Thayer had grown accustomed to exploiting his daughter’s nerves in the big moments.
“Before, I’d get inside her head on the last three holes and win,” he said, “now she birdies the last hole and wins.”
Makenna Thayer didn’t make a big deal out of beating her father, but the poised sophomore isn’t letting anything faze her.
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“Her attitude is the most important thing to me,” said Kenny Thayer, who likened his daughter’s lackadaisical attitude to that of pro Dustin Johnson.
“I don’t know if she got a birdie, an eagle or a triple,” he continued. “She handles it well and doesn’t put too much pressure on herself. She might make two or three bogeys in a row and be like, ‘I’m still pretty good,’ and then she’ll get eight pars and a birdie in a row.”
That’s pretty much it for Makenna Thayer at the 2024 state tournament last week in Colorado Springs. After shooting a precise putting 79 on the first day, Thayer opened the second round last Tuesday with a bogey, triple bogey and another bogey.
“A lot of people would have just panicked,” Kenny Thayer said, “but she just calmed the nerves.”
Battle Mountain coach Chris Hoebel said the difficult course at Colorado Country Club “forces our players to make smart decisions about how they play golf.”
“This was not a course where you could just pick up your driver and blast the ball,” he said. “Not to mention, the wind off the lake made the last nine holes play completely differently on day one than they did on day two. Makena really managed to rise to the challenge.”
After a tough start to Day 2, Thayer finished with six consecutive pars. She finished the last nine holes in 39 for fourth place overall with a two-day total of 159, the best result in Husky history, Hoebel said. Thayer was one stroke away from competing for the silver medal with Windsor’s Macy Cleave and Erie’s Hadley Ashton, both juniors. Ashton’s teammate, senior Logan Hale (142), won.
“I thought it was good for the conditions and the course,” said Thayer, who placed 13th last year. When asked if the state championship experience helped her, she replied, “No, it’s the same,” proving that overthinking is truly overrated.
“She’s so easy-going, easy-going and relaxed,” Kenny Sayer said. “You can’t put a price on that.”
“That’s just the way I’ve always played,” Makena Sayer said of her mentality. “If I make a mistake, I try not to think too much about it. I just say, ‘Next hole,’ because every hole is a new opportunity. I think if I overthink it and am too hard on myself, it’s not going to produce good results.”
The 15-year-old said she has improved her mechanics and gotten stronger this year, which has helped her hit more distance with every club.
“Last year, every time I was on the green with my second shot, I was just thinking, ‘I’m going to hit it on the green,'” she said. “But now I’m thinking, ‘I’m going to hit it close to the hole and get a birdie.'”
Kenny Sayre also believes that improved course management in general, “particularly club selection, reading the greens and patience” are the reasons his daughter’s performance has improved dramatically in 2024. Though he offers Makena instruction, he hasn’t overly dabbled in her technique or forced her to focus on golf year-round.
“She’s not a one-dimensional person,” he said of the “easy-going” 15-year-old who runs cross country in the fall, skis with the Huskies in the winter and plays lacrosse in addition to golf in the spring.
“She really does four sports because she has four different friend groups. Back in the day, I wasn’t sure if she was really passionate about anything other than her friends,” Thayer said, adding, “She definitely seems to be getting more and more into golf.”
If beating her father was last summer’s big breakthrough, Kenny Thayer may have already witnessed the next milestone in his daughter’s development. Though he couldn’t attend Day 2 of the state tournament, he listened by phone as Makenna recounted the challenge and triumph on the final hole.
“Usually you ask, ‘How’s your golf going?’ and she says, ‘Good,’ and that’s it,” Kenny Thayer said.
“She said, ‘Dad, on this hole I hit my driver into the rough and it just went left. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to put any spin on it because of the lie, but I had to run over the water and I didn’t want it to roll off the green. So I knew if it came down short of the green it was going to bounce up, but I knew I had to get it over the water. So I hit this shot and it pulled the ball and it rolled over the side of the hole,'” he continued.
“It was the first time in my life that she’d really talked to me about golf. I nearly fell off my chair and thought this was the best moment ever.”
