KANG Danielle

General
DEALING WITH ANXIETY
She has spoken about struggling with anxiety and how she tries to handle it while golfing. "I've won a tournament feeling the way I felt and I've lost a tournament feeling the way I felt. I want to be able to be in control of how I feel. A lot of people can't. They can't control the way they think, the way they feel, but what I can do is work on it and practise how to accept that or deal with it better. That's one of the things I want to figure out. Everyone deals with anxiety, it's not just me, it's not just you. Everyone has their moments and everybody is going through something. My anxiety with golf came from the swing yips, too. It's not about feeling that your anxiety is about, it's about all the hard work you put in and can't pull the trigger and you want to cry because you can't do it. I try to talk about random things with my caddie to take my mind off it." (golfchannel.com, 14 Apr 2021; GOLFTV Facebook page, 04 Aug 2020)

TRANSITION TO PRO
After an amateur career in which she won the 2010 and 2011 US Women's Amateur Championship, she turned professional in August 2011 but says she found the first years of her professional career tough. Her father passed away due to cancer in 2013, and following this she contemplated giving up the sport. "I felt like golf took away things that I wished I [had not] missed out on. I was young. I missed my friends. I missed graduation. I missed spending time with my family. I'm out on the road alone. Everything that it was that I should be in love with, I wasn't in love with. I just played to play, and I was very angry and I wasn't happy. And I told my mum that eventually. And she said to me, 'If you're not happy, stop playing'." After a brief spell away from the sport, she decided to continue, and went on to secure her first win as a professional at the 2017 KPMG Women's PGA Championship in Olympia Fields, IL, United States of America. (lpga.com, 06 May 2021; edition.cnn.com, 25 Feb 2021)