Natasha Oon Is Figuring It All Out

"I'm just so glad I get to enjoy a weekend," means something more for a professional golfer. Each and every week, you fight to play 36 more on Saturday and Sunday, because if you're not making a cut, you're probably not making any money. It's been a rocky first year for LPGA rookie Natatsha Oon who hasn't made a cut since The ShopRite in May. She's making just her 11th start this week at the CPKC Women's Open in Alberta, Canada and she's finally starting to see the fruits of her labor pay off.

Though, she's not exactly sure why or how it all came together this week over others.

"I actually played I think really well last week [in Portland] and I wasn't feeling off at all. I was just kind of like, ahhhh. You know, it didn't make sense a little bit," she said after her 5-under round of 65 on Friday at the CPKC. "I felt good. I played good. I just think like, you know, this is a nice time for things to come together and it's really nice to see everything tie up really well."

Oon has quickly become one of the players I truly love to see on a press conference lineup. She's so unabashedly open. She's quirky, and she doesn't shy away from it. But behind the giggles and random outbursts—her honest-to-God stream of consciousness coming through—is an insightful young woman who seems deeply in tune with herself.

After missing her third consecutive cut, Oon posted an Instagram reel about the disappointment of another early weekend. But even in that moment, she was trying to find the joy in the failure—to take something from it instead of letting it take something from her.

And maybe that's the biggest difference between the Oon who missed those three cuts and the one we saw this week. She didn't necessarily figure out how to play better golf. She figured out how to get over the bad stuff a little faster.

Maybe Portland was the reset Oon needed—not to play better golf, but to find ways to get over the hurdles quicker and minimize the scar tissue that comes with playing it.. This game can often feel like a thousand little paper cuts all at once, and it's important to wire your brain to feeling like you can heal quick.

But the funny thing is, Oon wasn't suddenly comfortable this week, either. When asked about what's been going through her mind this week the 24-year-old said, "You see the cut staring at you. You see like -- but you're hitting good shots. But I didn't really feel comfortable out there but I was just more like, if I could kind of just commit to a shot then that's really all I could do, because I really, really trusted myself out there."

The result of trusting herself? A 5-under par round of 65, her lowest score of the season, and a spot inside the top-10 heading into the weekend.

Turns out, sometimes the ebbs and flows of golf aren't about finding a way to avoid the lows. They're about learning how to get through them fast enough to recognize when you're finally back on the upswing.