OXFORD | Julia Johnson shed tears throughout her drive down Interstate 55. She questioned her future, her plan, spending the hours navigating the rural route vertically down Mississippi and back into south Louisiana while also navigating a different path for her college career.
It was October 2015, and Johnson, an LSU commit, an eventual four-time state champion, the No. 1 junior player in Louisiana and a Louisiana amateur champion, thought she was simply spending a weekend in Oxford with her friends — and Ole Miss golf commits — Macy Holliday and Conner Beth Ball for the LSU at Ole Miss football game.
Johnson had never met Ole Miss golf coach Kory Henkes. She knew nothing about the mostly hapless history of the Ole Miss women’s golf program.
And Johnson didn’t know that 5.5 years later, she would again be making that drive north to south, this time in preparation for Ole Miss’ 2021 NCAA regional appearance in Baton Rouge that begins Monday, leading a program that has gone from irrelevant to top-five nationally and as for Johnson, she’s the face of the remarkable rise and the most decorated player in program history.
And, back in 2015, she was ready to plead for a roster spot.
“I felt at home here from the second I got here,” Johnson said. “I begged (Henkes) to let me come play for her. I had no idea what my future would hold and it all worked out so well.”
Johnson committed to LSU in 2014 as a sophomore out of St. Gabriel, Louisiana, a 20-minute trip south from Baton Rouge. Her family is full of LSU alumni, and she took the local, first offer that came her way. She admits she was too young for the decision, but it’s become normalized in college recruiting circles.
That weekend in Oxford, as Ole Miss was beating LSU, 38-17 to move one win from a Sugar Bowl berth, changed everything. There’s an unwritten rule in women’s golf that when a player is committed to a school, other programs don’t recruit said player.
So, Henkes, who was in her first year with the Rebels, called the LSU coaching staff to tell them she was listing Johnson as a recruiting visitor but only so she could be on the football field in pregame with her friends.
“I remember Kory introducing herself to me and then not saying a word,” Johnson said. “Looking back at that now, it was extremely respectful. She had just come in and had no recruits yet and was just taking over, and we were ranked in the hundreds or something so for her to play it by the book so well, to be so honorable about the process, I respected her for that.”
Henkes left an impression, even with her silence, and Johnson fell in love with the town and the campus and the festivities on a home football weekend. That led to the emotions during the 343-mile drive home the next day.
“I stepped out and saw the square for the first time and campus and I told myself how this is a college town because Baton Rouge is so big and doesn’t feel like a college town sometimes,” Johnson said. “I said ‘this is amazing and I love it here’ and I remember driving home by myself crying. Looking at it now I was so hopeless driving home and so scared about talking to the LSU head coach
“I loved Kory’s vision because she was young and had goals and so many things she wanted to do here. I wanted to be a part of that and that program.”
Johnson admits her dad, Chuck, wasn’t initially pleased with her decision to decommit from the Tigers. It wasn’t easy to see the vision of leaving the state for a program that had never made it out of NCAA regional play.
But she made the difficult phone call, opening up her recruitment relatively late in the process with the singular hope of joining the Rebels. She took a couple other trips to make sure of her decision, at her mother Carolyn’s request, and then, in January 2016, she finalized what was set in motion a few months before.
“The gamble was on her part, not ours,” Henkes said. “She had great options, and we were ranked out of the top 100. But I knew she was going to be great. She just had that moxie.”
Henkes started her build two years before Johnson enrolled, taking over in 2015 after four years and three NCAA regional berths as the head coach at Augusta University. Prior to Henkes’ arrival, Ole Miss had never had a top-25 national finish, had only once — a third place finish in 1999 — placed in the top half of the SEC Tournament and had never finished in the top 10 of even an NCAA regional.
Ole Miss finished seventh in the SEC in Henkes’ first season, but the climb hit hyperdrive when Johnson and Ball arrived on campus in 2017. The Rebels finished third in the San Francisco Regional, advancing to the NCAA Championships for the first time behind Johnson’s third place individual regional finish.
Ole Miss finished 24th nationally, and Johnson was named the SEC Freshman of the Year. She was the first Ole Miss freshman to win a 54-hole event.
“Since the day I’ve gotten here, the way we practice and prepare, especially the first year when we had to be so perfect to even be contenders in tournaments… Everything felt like a national championship team but we didn’t necessarily have the talent of a national championship team,” Johnson said. “We practiced and prepared as if we were good enough and that set the tone in our minds.”
As a sophomore, Johnson finished runner-up in stroke play and went 3-0 in match play to help Ole Miss win its first-ever SEC Championship. The Rebels again advanced out of NCAA regional play and improved to 14th nationally — another program record.
Johnson remembers the Cinderella nature of Ole Miss’ SEC title run and considers it the best memory she’s had as a Rebel. But, in a way, it was a needed step in the process to respectability, to increasing goals and being considered a top-tier program.
Henkes was recruiting at a much higher level than any other time in program history, and transfer additions Kennedy Swann from Clemson in 2018 and Ellen Hume prior to this season accelerated the process.
"After the SECs, it was more ‘oh that’s Ole Miss and they will compete hard but yeah that was cute.’” Johnson said. “We’ve been called scrappy by journalists and we're not a scrappy team. We’re a good team… It’s been nice to have more respect now, to be expected to be contenders.”
Johnson recalls seeing Stanford’s women’s golf team at the 2018 San Francisco Regional and how teams feel the presence of one of the tournament favorites. Over the years, she senses other programs viewing the Rebels with a similar reverence.
“I remember the feeling I got as a freshman seeing Stanford and UCLA and I remember that, being intimidated,” Johnson said. “We have that vibe. Teams know we are a team to beat and it’s hard to beat us when we play our best. It’s a feeling. You can feel it.”
In November 2019, the Rebels won the Battle at the Beach, in Cabo, Mexico, by seven shots over a 16-team field that included eight ranked teams. Johnson tied the NCAA record with an 11-under 61 in the final round. And, earlier in the week, Johnson noticed that feeling of being a contender, a favorite, from another team in the field.
“We were chipping and as we walked past a few girls, they said ‘no no, y’all go ahead, we don’t want y'all to see us chip,’” Johnson said. “I thought, ‘wow you’re an SEC team. That’s crazy.’”
That ascension took a major step this past October when the Rebels claimed the East Lake Cup, a Golf Channel-televised event featuring the top four teams in the nation. Ole Miss was the top seed by winning the stroke play portion and then knocked off Texas 4.5-0.5 and South Carolina 3-2 to win the fall schedule’s biggest national event.
When the COVID-19 pandemic halted the 2019-2020 season, Ole Miss had won four of the six tournaments it had played with a second place finish and third place finish in the other two.
“We could have won a national championship (last year) when the season got stopped,” Johnson said. “The transition from freshman year to now has gone from a total underdog no one thought could get a top 10 at some tournaments to we’re ranked top five in the country or No. 2 in the country, and we won East Lake. We have respect on our name now.”
The program’s top five team scoring averages for a season have been under Henkes, and the top four are the four years Johnson has been on campus.
She’s also coming back next season to take advantage of the extra year of eligibility due to the pandemic. She graduated in three years and will have an MBA and a second master’s degree before her eligibility is complete.
Johnson holds the school record for career stroke average and joins Dori Carter as the program’s only All-America selections. Her program records also include most rounds par or under in a season, most rounds par or under in a career and most rounds in the 60s.
She's also the only two-time Palmer Cup (think collegiate Ryder Cup) member in program history. Johnson also competed in the Augusta National Women's Amateur.
“It’s truly incredible,” Henkes said. “She made a list of everything she wanted to do at Ole Miss and everything but a national championship has been marked off the list.”
The pursuit of that final goal begins Monday at University Club in Baton Rouge, a course Johnson has played countless times. Ole Miss is the No. 2 seed, and while injuries have hampered them in recent weeks, the goal remains to get back to the NCAA Championships and to get to match play — the portion of tournament play that the Rebels have most excelled.
“The appeal coming here was I can build a name while building a name for our program,” Johnson said. “Kory would make me better. The belief I had in her and the belief she had in me. We’ve gotten better every year we’ve been here.
“It’s easy as an underdog when no one knows who you are,” Johnson said. “We saw that our freshman year. There’s no pressure. No one expected Ole Miss to make it to the national championship. They expect it now.”
