Beth Lillie has never been past the gates at Augusta National Golf Club but, like many golf fans who have been to Augusta, Georgia, she’s quite familiar with the view of Magnolia Lane from Washington Road.
When Lillie’s Virginia team played the Valspar Augusta Invitational, head coach Ria Scott detoured the team van past the entrance, as you do.
“We laid down on the grass and did the whole tacky thing,” Lillie said. “It was probably pretty brutal to watch.”
This is the week that Lillie gets inside, having earned an invitation to the Augusta National Women’s Amateur with the rest of the nation’s top female amateurs.
Lillie’s is a name that flies under the radar. She’s currently ranked No. 65 in the World Amateur Golf Ranking, qualified for the U.S. Women’s Open in 2016 when she was 16 years old, qualified for the NCAA Women’s Championship last year as an individual and finished ninth and has finished runner-up in two of her last three college starts.
Despite all that, Lillie just wasn’t ready to check out after four years. The Virginia victory lap brought a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with the ANWA invitation. It’s a big platform for a deep thinker like Lillie, who earned a Bachelor of Arts in politics and is now working on a masters in intercollegiate athletic administration at Virginia.
Playing at Augusta is sometimes hard to comprehend, Lillie said.
“But it’s obviously so special and I feel like it’s something that probably will take a long while to soak in how special it is for me, especially that I’m a fifth year and this is probably my only chance of ever playing in this tournament,” she said.
Savoring the moment has been just as important to Lillie throughout this season as it will be this week. Three days before the start of the ANWA, Lillie was teeing it up with her team across the country at the Ping/ASU Invitational, and that was her sole focus.
Asked how she’d been prepping for Augusta, Lillie said she was just prepping for each college tournament as it came.
“Physical prep, I feel like I’m doing what I normally do to get ready for tournaments,” she said. “I feel like a big part of it is mental preparation and trying to keep my energy up, keep my schoolwork up, and know that I’m going to be missing a lot of class coming up.
“I don’t want to miss the team events for the world and that’s the most important thing this semester for me and the Augusta thing will just be an added bonus.”
Scott names being present as one of Lillie’s greatest strengths. That’s been key not only in her Augusta preparation, but in the few times this season when Lillie found herself in a playoff for a position in the lineup. Sports psychologists at Virginia have encouraged players to downplay situations – make them less important.
“I think Beth is really good at playing the game that’s in front of her,” Scott said. “Yes, Augusta is grand and important and the biggest stage in women’s amateur golf, but I think you’ll see Beth Lillie just soaking in every moment when she’s there.”
Some of that may come from Lillie’s ability to see the big picture. As part of her Masters program, she had to select an internship. From a wide-ranging list, some in athletics and some having nothing to do with athletics, Lillie chose a job in the football video services office despite having no experience in video production.
At Virginia, the football team’s Thursday’s Heroes program brings a child or adult in a difficult circumstance (medical, physical, cognitive, etc.) to team practice each Thursday. The day involves a tour of the facility, sitting in on a practice and then a day-ending gift-giving ceremony. Lillie’s job was to film each guest’s experience and make a video out of it.
Sometimes she’d find herself tearing up over the computer as she put together the footage.
“Some people, maybe outsiders, look at college sports as just college sports, that’s all you’re doing it for,” Lillie said. “But to me, I know that my golf team, it feels like we matter in bigger ways than that and it’s a bigger part of our identify and I feel like for the football team, part of their identity was this huge commitment to the community. Really being men of service.”
On the golf team, Scott and assistant coach Marissa Dodd encouraged the adoption of three guiding values: latitude, fortitude and gratitude. During the pandemic, with less golf being played, they were thoughtful conversation starters.
The latter two are easy enough to grasp, but Lillie described the first as having grace for yourself and others and understanding that even from your own place in the world, you can make a difference. From that grew the latitude project. Every week in a team group message, a player would share something that mattered to her. Lillie discussed a research project on equal pay for women’s college coaches but voting rights, economic access to golf and mental health were other topics.
All that will travel with Lillie to Augusta, a latitude with unparalleled impact in the golf world.
“Just knowing what a big thing it is and how impactful it can be, it just reinforces how much I need to go and live so much in the present and just have fun above literally everything else,” she said.
