- Cassie Sengul, a college golfer with cerebral palsy, found her sport after trying many others that were too physically demanding.
- A softball coach’s observation about her swing led Sengul to try golf, where she now plays collegiately and competes in adaptive tournaments.
- Experts suggest that trying various activities helps young athletes find a sport that fits their abilities and provides long-term fulfillment.
Cassie Sengul tried swimming. She tried horseback riding, cheerleading, soccer, and softball.
“My parents put me around every sport you could think of, sometimes doing three at one time, just to keep me active,” she says. “But I could never keep up with my teammates as much. I could never really excel.”
Sengul, 19, was diagnosed with cerebral palsy – a brain disorder that causes problems with normal motor function – at around age 2.
During her early teenage years, Sengul had a life-altering conversation with her softball coach, who told her: “You don’t really have a softball swing. It’s more of a golf swing, so you should give it a try just for fun.”
She attended a summer golf camp and started taking lessons. She came into her own at Gainesville (Virginia) High.
She is now a college sophomore who plays for NCAA Division III Drew University and is nationally and internationally ranked at adaptive golf.
“The more that we understand the development of kids and how that interacts with their health development – getting out, doing something physical, connecting with other people, feeling some responsibility – it just seems to be more and more important as time goes on,” says Matthew Oetgen, an orthopedist on the team at Children’s National Hospital that has performed two surgeries on Sengul. “It can get on the other side of it when there’s so much pressure to perform or these kids get sort of pigeonholed into one thing very early on.
“But Cassie’s story is great because she’s an active person who wanted to do a lot of stuff and then found this sport that not only is good for her, but she’s good at after trial and error doing certain things.”
Sengul will try to defend her women’s title at the GAP Adaptive Championship starting Oct. 6 in Telford, Pennsylvania. Her story is also one for all of us to take in about how athletics can carry us through life, and how we don’t have to start a sport early on to become elite.
She and Oetgen spoke with USA TODAY Sports about how young athletes can find long-term fulfillment with sports and meet athletic goals, no matter which obstacles face them.
We don’t have to follow what others are doing. Just help your kids find the sport they love
According to Children’s National Hospital, cerebral palsy affects body movement, muscle control, coordination, reflexes, posture and balance.
Children with cerebral palsy can experience issues with spasticity and tightness, Oetgen says. As bones grow, muscles, which are already tight, get stretched, which exacerbates the problem.
But stretching, building up muscle and working on motor control can counterbalance the condition’s effects on the body.
“Kids who are immobile or kids who don’t do very much, it tends to affect them a lot more,” Oetgen says. “And then kids who work on stretching and what I would call passively stretching, which is just walking around and being active, you’re sort of always stretching things out, it tends to counteract that tightening of the muscles and the constant sort of spasticity. And Cassie is one that has always been very active and has moved and done things. And that’s why I think she’s done so well from these procedures.”
Sengul had left foot and ankle surgery around age 7 and then had one to reposition her left big toe when she was 12.
“It’s not just a passive journey,” Oetgen says. “You get the foot in the right position, but you gotta work on it more and she’s always done that, which has sort of helped her do so well over time.”
Still, she was frustrated by her play at sports. What she didn’t realize, what many of us don’t realize, is that she was putting herself along a path to find the one that fit her best.
“I always did recreational because I knew it was gonna be too difficult to take it to the next level,” she says. “When I played soccer, softball, it was so much running and cardio that it was so hard for me to keep up, but I’d just wear out a lot quicker.
“With golf, it’s more of a duration over four hours, so it gives me time to get breaks, but I’m still moving for those four hours so it’s been a lot easier for me to do and it’s not as hard on my body to recover after a round.”
Keep searching for the right sport, the right situation, and believe in yourself once you get there
Sengul wanted to play a sport in high school, but needed one that worked with social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic. She found golf, or perhaps golf found her.
“It’s just sort of a unique sport that combines those things in the lower extremity that is more than just walking around,” Oetgen says. “Kids who have some weakness in the muscles, obviously walking and doing things will help strengthen the muscle. Playing golf, you’re walking a lot and you’re up and down the hills and side hills and all that sort of stuff, that forces you to get exercise and strength in the lower extremities, just by being out there.
“And then when you play on the level that Cassie plays, where you’re really pushing yourself and swinging hard, you’re putting a lot of torque and a lot of stretching on the body and a lot of that stuff comes from the lower extremity where Cassie would have the most effect from the condition. …
“It helps to have such a positive patient, and wanting to get better, and she did awesome.”
Sengul says it was “100% difficult at first.” She says both sides are still affected, but her left side is severely impacted. The physical therapy has come in her action and movement.
She is right-handed and even with stretching, she rotates less than the average golfer.
But she started going to weekly golf camps or clinics and slowly got addicted.
“I can remember my dad when I wanted to play golf, he was like, ‘Ohhhh, this is gonna be difficult,’ ” Sengul says. “He’s like, ‘Don’t expect to make the team your freshman year.’ And I wanted to prove him wrong so bad. And I did.
“It’s kind of basic, but you can do anything you put your mind to. I really wanted to be great at a sport and it was just finding the right one, and then once I found it, it’s all I wanted to do is be great and be a role model for future generations.”
If we handle the mental side of sports, we also help control the physical
She couldn’t hit it as far as everybody else, but that just meant she had to get really good at scoring with her short game and gaining confidence in as many areas as she could control.
What’s that Yogi Berra once said? Ninety percent of baseball is mental, the other half is physical. In golf, it can work the same way.
“Playing in a sport where it wasn’t just about your physical ability, it was more about how strong your mental game is, that kind of allowed me also to play well,” Sengul says. “I can shoot some solid rounds and put myself in contention more than I was ever able to do with any other sport. …
“I didn’t start on my freshman year team because I was at a different high school, but going into my sophomore year, I knew I could play and then that season I ended up starting every tournament and I was actually starting to shoot low rounds. So that was really the turning point and then I didn’t think I’d play it collegiately until I started getting coaches emailing me. I was like, ‘Whoa, I did not see this coming, but maybe I should. Maybe this will be fun.’ ”
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You make friends when you have teammates with common goals and interests
Cassie also tried out adaptive golf, which allows people with disabilities to play through modified rules or equipment, based on their abilities.
Players are put in an impairment category – Sengul’s is coordination – and assessors place them at a yardage they think is appropriate.
“I play with people who hit it just as far as me,” she says. “Even if they have different conditions than me, we still all hit it around the same distance.”
Everyone is encouraged to play adaptive golf. Think of it as if every club team played in a competitive tier that matched their own skills.
“I’ve always gotten stared at my whole life, just because of the way I walked, but a lot of the time when people look at me weirdly, I’m like, ‘I know I can play better than you,’ ” she says. “I’ve never had anybody say anything, but I do get stares, but I’ve been taught to ignore them.”
Sengul entered the U.S. Adaptive Open in 2024. She says she walked around feeling timid but had that inner strength sports helped teach her. She finished fifth overall.
This past summer, as one of the younger players in the field at the U.S. Adaptive Open, she grabbed the overnight lead after the second round and finished fourth overall at 21-over 240 in three rounds.
“It’s not about how good you shoot that day or how many putts drop,” she says. “It’s really about connecting with people and connecting with yourself on the course.”
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Find a game you can enjoy with others and have for life
Golf is an individual sport, but as we’ve seen in the Ryder Cup, players can be most passionate when the’ are playing for each other. Sengul feels the connection at Drew University, where she plays the same tees as everyone else.
She has learned to tell herself after a bad day, “Nobody’s going to remember this round in a week.” She also knows she can lean on others.
“I’m a vital part of the team and they know that; they don’t treat me any different,” she says. “They want me to win, so it’s just really special to have them always with me. We lost our conference championship last year. We ended up losing in a tiebreaker. So we all felt the pain of it. But we can make the most of what we have that’s in front of us.”
In adaptive golf, she says she mainly rides in a cart between holes just for pace of play. But overall she walks as much as possible when playing to get ready for college.
“We play basically every day here at school,” she says. “It’s five days of practice, and then you have a tournament over the weekend. So it was a lot just adjusting my body to that. And we do workouts during the week, too. So it was a lot for me to take on at first, but if I just keep doing it, it works out fine.”
‘What do you need to play?’
She feels the support from Taner Sengul and Kristina Peterman, the parents who let her try everything. Peterman caddies for her at adaptive tournaments.
“She doesn’t really have any golf knowledge, but it’s just about having fun and having a bond in a sport, which you really wouldn’t have with a parent, unless they were your coach,” Sengul says. “So it’s really gotten me closer with my parents.
“We’ll go and play on the weekends and have fun, but I’m better than them so they know not to try to teach me anything.”
Her sister, Alexa, 25, who grew up playing soccer, will sometimes get on the course with her, too.
“There is no age limit for this,” she says, “and you just meet so many people that you wouldn’t usually meet. Even if you get paired with some randoms on the course, you may have something in common and then you can become really close in adaptive golf.”
As Cassie spoke in a video interview last month, she was about to attend a Broadway show with a friend she met through adaptive golf.
“I’ve really gotten to know a lot of people from different backgrounds and how golf has all brought us together to make a movement in sports,” she says.
Issa Nlareb won last year’s men’s division champ at the GAP Adaptive Championship after shooting an even-par 145. He contracted bacterial meningitis in 2017, which resulted in amputation of both legs and several fingers.
“What do you need to play?” his doctor asked him.
He says she gave him straps to tie his feet and tie his hand to the club to help him grip it.
Oetgen sees Cassie once a year, mainly, he says, to hear stories of her progress. He followed her online at last summer’s U.S. Adaptive Open, thinking about how many other young athletes she is helping along the way.
“I always talk about Cassie and I have one other (12-year-old) patient who came in with a broken arm, and I asked her how she did it, and she fell off a rock climbing wall,” he says. “She said, ‘I’m a nationally ranked rock climber …. my parents just told me to keep on trying stuff until I got good at something.’ And she found rock climbing.
“And so I think it’s important to, early on, have people try different things and then you eventually find the thing that you like or that you’re good at. Cassie’s a great example there.’
Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.