Dance Helped Walts Find Home Sweet Home on Rocky Top
Dom Palumbo
To many, sports are considered a form of art.
The movements of the athletes represent the strokes on a canvas. The natural gameday noises are equivalent to the notes and beats created by the world’s best musicians.
In golf, it’s a dance.
The steady balance a player needs in bringing the club to the top of the swing.
The slight pause, before whipping the club through the down swing, attacking the ball and sending it into the cool air.
At the end, there’s a pose to be struck with a clean and controlled follow through.
Shoulders square. Back foot up. Eyes following the path of the recently crushed ball.
For Tennessee women’s golf junior Hadley Walts, dance and golf are not only synonymous, they define a large portion of her life.
From the age of eight, she decided that dance and golf were the recreational avenues she wanted to pursue.
Both of which she found an early love for, and an ability to hone.
“My mom actually owns a cheer and dance facility,” she said. “So, she’s been my dance teacher since I could walk. I basically grew up at the dance studio. That’s what I did with my mom, and golf is what I did with my dad.”
In the dance studio she quickly garnered the attention not only of other dance coaches, but the attention of those who create popular TV shows such as “Dance Moms.”
“I got pretty good when I was eight or nine and started doing really well at competitions, and that’s how we got referred to try out for the different shows,” Walts said. “From dance competition owners knowing my mom and I, they have various connections in the dance industry, they referred our names and we ended up going through the audition processes from there.”
The connections helped, and her ability helped even more, as she soon found herself starring in living rooms across the country, on not one, but two reality TV shows.
“I was on two reality TV shows,” Hadley recalled. “The first one was called ‘Abbey’s Ultimate Dance Competition,’ and I was on about eight episodes of that when I was 12. That one was filmed in Los Angeles, and my mom and I stayed there for about nine weeks. The producers from that show liked me and my mom on the show, so from there they asked us to be on the opposing team for Abbey Lee Miller’s Dance Competition team on ‘Dance Moms.’ We filmed about five episodes of that—the show was based out of Canton, Ohio, but we traveled all around for those different competitions. From (age) 12-13, I was flying out and doing that.”
During this same time, Hadley was making strides on the golf course, meaning there were multiple summers during which she spent time juggling her two passions.
“Managing them both was a lot, because I was still competing with my actual dance studio. And on top of that, I was doing a television show and golf.
“There were a few summers where I wasn’t home at all. I would fly to Florida for a golf tournament, then fly straight to New Orleans or Canton to film. It was a lot of back-and-forth for about three years of my life.
“Honestly, doing that with my mom and that support system was really how we made it through.”
Walts found a way to manage her time, but eventually a decision had to be made.
“When I was 12, I realized that I was really starting to get good at golf, but the timing was weird, because that’s when the show was really starting for me. I was trying to balance and juggle it, and after I decided to stop the show, I was about to head into my freshman year of high school. That’s when I really made the decision to focus on golf.
“I knew that golf was in the long run going to be more beneficial—and I loved both of them—but it was hard leaving, because dance had been such a huge part of my life for so long and I had done so much with it that it was going to be really weird (to give it up). My mom owning a dance studio has really helped me stay around it and in it, and that helped a lot.”
In high school, Walts was a phenom on the links, leading Evansville North High School to three consecutive Indiana State Championships in 2014, 2015 and 2016, while carding top-3 finishes as both a sophomore (2015) and senior (2017).
At the junior level, she qualified for the 2016 and 2017 U.S. Women’s Amateur Four Ball Championship and qualified as an alternate for the 2017 U.S. Women’s Amateur.
She had a number of schools after her, but for the southern Indiana native, choosing where to spend the next four years of her life was pretty easy.
“My dad actually played football at Austin Peay,” Walts said. “In college, he would come and visit here and fell in love with it. Because of that, he would always tell me to consider Tennessee, and I just had no idea what UT was. This is actually the only school I visited. I had other schools recruiting me, but I only visited here and committed in October of my sophomore year. This place really just made an impression on me. (The Blackburn-Furrow) clubhouse wasn’t here yet, but the (Day Golf Practice Facility) was just so crazy-nice that I fell in love with it immediately.”
She made Rocky Top home, but struggled to find her footing on a talented team with NCAA aspirations.
“College golf was definitely a big adjustment,” Walts recalled. “I think I learned a lot about myself and my game. I took time and prepared really well over that summer. My game was good, but my confidence wasn’t, and that was something I really worked on and tried to improve. It’s just a different mindset. You’ve done this for so long, but coming into college and doing it for a big university like the University of Tennessee is something I just had to work on.”
Walts appeared in just one tournament as a freshman, finishing 92nd at the Mercedes-Benz Collegiate. She went home knowing her game was in a good spot but needing to refine it to make the impact she knew she could.
“That summer, I was obviously working on my swing, but I really tried to focus on my overall mindset,” Walts said. “I came into that semester with a completely different mentality. I wasn’t going to be afraid to step on the tee and do what I knew how to do. It was totally mental, and coming into the fall and playing well right away was huge for me, because I was able to ride that momentum right off the bat.”
During that fall season, Hadley appeared in four of the Lady Vols’ five tournaments, carding a score in the 70s in every round she played, while helping UT to two of its three top-five finishes that season.
In the spring, as the Orange & White were beginning to gear up for postseason play, Walts put together the best weekend of her college career at the Westbrook Invitational.
“We didn’t even get a practice round at that course, because it rained,” she remembered. “We walked the course, but we didn’t play it at all. I went into it with no expectations, and I was just going to swing the club to the best of my ability. During those first two rounds I shot under par, but I knew that I left a lot of shots out there. I was hitting it really, really well, so I knew there was no reason why I couldn’t shoot a good score on the last day.”
After posting scores of 70 and 71, Walts went pin-seeking on day three, firing home a career-low round of 66, with a career-high seven birdies and just a single bogey to finish in sixth as an individual, while leading Tennessee to finish fifth in the 16-team field.
“On that day, I was playing really well—the lowest I had ever shot in a tournament was 68, so I was -4 at one point, and when I got it to -5 I just thought, ‘Okay, I’m a little lower than I’ve ever been right now,’” she said. “Then, I just kept telling myself to play confident and play my game, which in itself was a mental thing for me to get over, because I had never been that low in a tournament before.
“That just showed how much working on my mental game helped, because I was able to sustain that play throughout the round, and then I birdied my final hole as well. I was able to do it the whole way through. It was a cool experience, and now I’m able to look back on that tournament and really grow even more today from that time.”
Soon following that performance, the COVID-19 global pandemic reared its head, ending the Lady Vols’ 2019-20 campaign.
She and her teammates went home initially thinking it would be a quick, two- to three-week break before the grim reality of the situation settled in.
“We went home thinking we were only going to be home for two weeks, come back and start playing again,” Walts said. “So, we went home still practicing and preparing ready to come back. Then, we got the news that (the rest of the season) was canceled. None of us were together when we got the news. It was such a weird time. I took a few weeks off—it was still cold at the beginning of March in Indiana—to just rest, because we weren’t (training) and to get myself ready to prepare for the summer and the fall. I finished up classes and everything and was able to use that time—since we had so much time—to go out and play whenever. It was cool, because you could still golf, which was helpful.”
As spring slowly turned into summer, Walts and the rest of her teammates returned to Knoxville, poised for a new season, with a few fresh faces, ready to build on what they left behind in March.
“I think the moment we all stepped back here was really good,” she said. “Our team chemistry has been really good, and everyone is so excited. So, just the expectation of having that good team chemistry we know that we all have to be on the same page as a team all the time.
“I think that’s the important key for us, and we’re ready, because it’s been so long.”
As she continues her junior year, with eyes continually set toward the goals her and her teammates have for the spring, Walts continually draws from her experiences off the course, should her swing ever fall short of where it needs to be.
“Definitely, the balance and flexibility aspect of dance helps me to be aware of my body in golf and in the swing,” Walts said. “Whenever I’m stretching before a round, or if I feel something is off in my swing, I have good awareness of what might be happening because of how I used my body in dance. It’s really interesting, and I think it’s helped a lot.
“Maybe it’s not a position for me, but a different feeling for how I can get my body where it needs to be. I also use the course as if it’s a performance like I would in dance.”
Walts continually looks at golf not necessarily as a competition, but a performance to create—one in which the judges are the pins and the 18 squares on every score card.
