When their firstborn Ethan was 6 months old, Matt and Jerlyn Shepherd moved to a house on the 18^th fairway at Dye’s Walk Country Club in Greenwood, Indiana. It’s the course Matt grew up on, and the back nine happens to be the first nine holes Pete Dye ever designed.   

Matt strapped a car seat to their family golf cart so that Ethan could join him. Erica came along two years later.

When Erica was old enough to hold a club, Matt put a bucket of range balls between his two kids and had Erica hold her plastic yellow club from the left side. He figured if the siblings were facing each other, they wouldn’t accidentally whack each other with a club.

That’s how Erica Shepherd, who is right-handed in every other way, became a left-handed golfer.

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This season, 25-year-old Shepherd will debut as an LPGA rookie boasting two distinctions: the tour’s only lefty and only Indiana native. The last Indiana native to earn an LPGA card was former Big Ten champion Danah Bordner in 2011.

“It is crazy because there’s so many guys that are lefty,” said Shepherd of her distinction. “I mean, there are so many people on tour that I’m sure are left-handed. There’s got to be at least like 10 percent of the tour has to be, like, naturally.”

On Monday, Erica and her parents will attend the College Football Playoff National Championship game in Miami to watch their beloved Hoosiers. Matt is a 1985 Indiana graduate, and the family has had basketball season tickets for 37 years and football season tickets for 22 years. The Bloomington campus is only 45 minutes from their house. (Mom graduated from Purdue.)

“Oh my gosh, this is just un-,  people don’t understand,” said Erica. “I was pretty much raised going to IU sporting events and the football games were just sad. … so this is incredible.”

Erica’s dedication to golf is a familiar tale. Like many younger siblings, she wanted to be like her older brother. And Ethan wasn’t about to let her win, either. Matt says his son always found an extra gear when playing against his sister.

“When they went out to play,” said Matt, “we knew someone was going to come back unhappy.”

Erica never felt burnout in golf because the Indiana winters forced her to put her clubs away. She played tennis, basketball, soccer and raised sheep for 4-H with Ethan.

Oreo, Daisy, Petunia. The sheep taught Erica a deep level of responsibility and a respect for the life her mother’s parents built on the family farm. When it came time to show the sheep at the county fair, she’d sleep in the pen.

On the basketball court, Erica was the first one on the floor diving after a loose ball. The talented, aggressive guard ultimately stopped playing after her freshman year, in part, to avoid serious injury. In choosing Duke and winning the 2017 U.S. Girls’ Junior, she followed in the footsteps of her mentor, longtime family friend Leigh Anne Creavy (nee Hardin), who is a member of both the Indiana Basketball and Golf halls of fame.

“I was her flower girl,” said Erica. “My middle name is Leigh, Erica Leigh after her, and she picked my first name.”

Erica graduated from Duke in 2023 while her brother played collegiate golf at Indiana University. Ethan now works in auditing at Ernst and Young in Cleveland, Ohio, where his fiancée is in medical school.

After a sparkling amateur career, professional golf hit hard. Erica missed the cut in her first seven events on the Epson Tour in 2024 after developing a bad case of the shanks.

“Those two years on the Epson Tour just tested every ounce of mental toughness and faith that I think I’ve had,” she said. “I mean, like amateur golf, junior golf, college golf was all just such a high. There was really nothing to worry about, nothing to lose. … But then on the Epson Tour, I mean, it’s obviously a very lonely life, like, it’s great too, but very lonely.”

She set out to find someone new to look at her swing and began working with Patrick Bedingfield at Bethesda Country Club in Maryland. The diagnosis: Her swing had gotten too flat.

“Since I started working with Pat, I didn’t hit another shank,” she said.

In addition to Bedingfield and her parents, of course, Erica credits her dog, Cody, with helping her through the darkness. He came on the scene in late 2024.

In her second season on the Epson Tour, Shepherd won the Murphy USA El Dorado Shootout in Arkansas for her first professional title. In December, she headed to the final stage of LPGA Q-School for the first time, where the cold and rainy conditions must have felt somewhat familiar to all those years growing up at Dye’s Walk.

Weather shortened the 90-hole event to 72 and when Shepherd came back for the final day of play on Tuesday, she only had seven holes left to complete. A frost delay gave her even more time to think about what needed to be done. She was in tears driving to the golf course as she thought about ending the day with her LPGA card.

 “On the last hole, I had like a 5-foot par putt to kind of seal the deal, and I kind of felt like that was one of the biggest putts of my life, and I just knew I had to make it,” said Shepherd, who made birdies on two of her last five holes to make the cut on the number.

“I’ve always played my best when I know what I need to do.”

Shepherd lives in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, and plays out of Hobe Sound Golf Club with LPGA players Brooke Matthews and Lauren Hartlage. She could make her rookie debut in China at the Blue Bay LPGA on Hainan Island in March. If that doesn’t work out, she’s hoping to get into the Fortinet Founders Cup later that month in California.

A goal-oriented, cerebral player, Shepherd isn’t shy about what she wants to accomplish in the game. Since the age of 7, she’s said that she wants to win every major, and that desire hasn’t changed. This year, she has her sights set on Louise Suggs Rolex Rookie of the Year honors.

When golf became unbearably hard not too long ago, Shepherd questioned whether or not professional golf was really her path. She found herself imagining that she had her down daughter one day, and wondered which would make her prouder.

If she gave up her dream and made the courageous decision to pursue something else? Or if she stuck to her dream, trusted God and gave it everything she had?

She decided on the latter.

“I just trusted that there was a purpose in the pain,” said Shepherd. “Throughout my whole life, that’s always been the case. There’s never been pain that I haven’t been able to see a greater purpose, and I just continued to trust that.”