How often does one come across a player who revives a dead career? The rarity of it will answer itself. Ina Kim-Schaad has one such story. At 42, she became a two-time winner of the US Women’s Mid-Amateur Championship. This win, in 2025, at the Monterey Peninsula Country Club in Pebble Beach, held much more significance for her.

This match, echoing her 2019 win of the same tournament, was the longest championship in the history of the event’s history. Kim-Schaad rolled in an 18-foot birdie putt on the 23rd hole and defeated Hanley Long.  “I’m overwhelmed with emotion, honestly,” she said after the win. She loved the place, no doubt about that. This is where she married her husband, who was there, caddying for her this week. What made it even more special was his birthday coming week. With him and Kim-Schaad’s entire family behind the ropes, the emotions for her overflowed. “…it’s like there’s not even enough language to put around just all the feels that I’m feeling.”

Kim-Schaad’s name is now etched twice in the record books. And this was not something she would have expected years back, as the dream of golf was long buried by her. A non-linear journey, Kim-Schaad’s unexpected return to competition after over a decade, is worth knowing.

Early life and then a long goodbye

Ina Kim-Schaad’s parents introduced her to golf when she was six. Growing up in Los Angeles helped her make quick connections in golf, a nudge that helped her make a mark on the junior golf circuit. She soon built a reputation for her poise and precision on the course. Her sister Hana Kim, too, was a standout player.

Kim-Schaad’s breakthrough moment came in 2000, when she reached the final of the US Girls’ Junior Championship at Pumpkin Ridge. The event ended with her name being in the runner-up spot, yet her performance placed her among the nation’s top young talents.

This was the drive that carried her to Northwestern University, where she played collegiate golf from 2001 to 2005. On one side, she studied communications and business, and on the other, she captained the Wildcats women’s golf team in her senior year. This tug of war between academics and athletics did at times pose a curious question to her — golf or academics? In the end, she chose one.

“I knew I always wanted to go to school for the academics – and it had both for me – but when I got there, I loved golf, yet I really felt like I wanted to see what else was out there,” she once said. “So after my fourth year, I closed that chapter of my life.”

Hence, at 22, Ina Kim-Schaad closed her 16-year-old love for golf. She graduated with her major and sought to embark on a new challenge. If golf could not make her travel the world, her career in finance made up for it. She worked in major cities around the world — from Chicago, LA, San Francisco, London, to Hong Kong, and then finally New York. By then, the sport that once defined her had become a distant memory.

But life had its own way of working out.

Patching up with clubs and balls

If her world tour gave her global exposure, it also gave her her own love story. It was one of these travels that she met her now-husband Ian-Schaad.

But Ian-Schaad brought with him something that Kim would soon be thankful for. An avid golfer himself, Ian encouraged her to pick up the clubs again, just for fun. “He encouraged me to start playing again,” she recalled once. “He asked me to occasionally come play on the weekends, and I would. And that’s when I got that golf bug again.”

That golf bug left its bite. After more than a decade away, Kim-Schaad began competing again in 2016. Talented as she was, she won the Metropolitan Golf Association’s Women’s Amateur — her first tournament back. This win proved that she still had the game in her, only that it was accumulating dust in one corner of her life. But by now, Kim-Schaad knew better.

She went on to win two more Met Women’s Amateur titles in 2018 and 2019, cementing her status as one of the top amateurs in the region. Her national breakthrough came later that same year, when she won her first US Mid-Am title at Forest Highlands Golf Club in Flagstaff, Arizona. She defeated Talia Campbell 3 and 2 in the final. This win was her re-coronation.

Since then, Kim-Schaad’s consistency only deepened. She kept qualifying for match play in six of her seven Mid-Amateur appearances, and earlier in 2024, she won the New York State Women’s Amateur. Her performances even earned her a spot back in the 2020 US Women’s Open (she missed the cut). Presently, she is a four-time Met Women’s Amateur Champion, with a runner-up position in 2025. And with the latest 2025 victory, she has been exempted into 2026’s championship at Riviera Country Club — an opportunity which is rare and special for a mid-am player.

If not for Ian, Ina Kim-Schaad probably would have never found her way back to the game. Now, at Monterey Peninsula, she is surrounded by her loved ones and the ocean air, standing as a champion who is on a path to hopefully many more successes. “Super proud. Today is just obviously icing on the cake,” she says.