Hyojin Yang, a high school student who is also a professional paraglider.
If you’re a golfer who takes up ‘paragliding’ as a way to train your courage, you’re not alone. Soaring over the world from high mountainous terrain, paragliding requires as much physical strength as it does exhilarating adventure. It takes two to three hours to ascend with a specially designed parachute weighing three to four kilograms in a straight line.메이저놀이터
Yang Hyo-jin (16), a freshman at Namnyeong High School in Jeju, who still has a fluffy face, laughs, “When I heard that Park Se-ri practiced shooting in front of the cemetery, I thought I would try paragliding, but it wasn’t as scary as I thought, and it was rather fun.” There is nothing poisonous about her smile, but when I heard about her golfing experience, it seemed like she was a poisonous person. In fact, the ‘graveyard courage training’ was a hoax, but many golfers have since tried it, including the ‘Seri Kids’ who started playing golf after admiring Park’s success myth.
Yang Hyo-jin, a full-time member of the Korean national team, is an amateur prospect whose fierce shots wow her professional sisters in the rare professional tournaments she gets to play.
As a junior in 2021 at the KLPGA Tour’s Jeju Samdasu Masters, she finished the first round in bad weather and made the cut the next day after a 35-hole push to become the top amateur finisher. Last year, as a junior, she also finished 14th at the SK networks-Seoul Economic Ladies Classic to become the amateur champion.
This year, she finished runner-up on the KLPGA’s secondary tour, the Dream Tour, and tied for 15th at the Lotte Open on the primary tour. Her amateur world ranking rose to No. 27.
Yang has a driver distance (carry) of 220 meters, which is more than enough for a professional, and her iron shots are accurate, with only one or two holes missing the green.
She’s still growing (she’s now 158 centimeters tall), but the key to her long game is that she hits the ball so accurately that her Smash Factor (ball speed/head speed) is as high as 1.5. She is very focused and has no jerky movements in her swing.
Hyojin Yang fell in love with the game of golf after following her golf-loving father to the driving range and watching the white ball fly into the blue sky. Since the second semester of her third year of elementary school, she has been dreaming of becoming a golfer, and she loves it so much that she has a unique dream of playing golf until she is 100 years old. “I’m so happy just playing golf that I don’t feel too stressed if my grades don’t go well,” she says.
His mother, Ko Young-rim, said, “I was worried that he would neglect his studies, so when I told him that he needed to solve all the math problems before he could practice, he gritted his teeth and solved all the difficult math problems in order to play golf.” He has read more than 1,000 English children’s books since he was a child.
The only hobby he doesn’t have anymore is professional baseball intuition. He watched the TV program “Choi Gang Baseball” and became a fan of KIA Tigers pitcher Yoon Young-cheol. After the amateur tournament, he will go to Suwon and Gwangju. We asked her which sport she thinks is more difficult, baseball or golf? “Golf is harder because I feel like it’s all my responsibility, but baseball is harder because I don’t have to be good at it,” Yang said.
“When I don’t perform well in golf, I look for reasons in myself, such as insufficient training or insufficient technique,” he said. The player he is most influenced by these days is Kim Hyo-ju, 28.
She was impressed by Kim when they played together at the SK networks-Seoul Economic Ladies Classic last year.
At the time, Kim had to withdraw after the second round and before the start of the third round due to a bad back, but she played her best until the end, earning applause from the fans. “It was really cool to see her not complain when she wasn’t feeling well, and to see her defend her par even when she was about to make bogey,” he said. One fan club member who traveled from Los Angeles to support Kim said that after seeing the younger Yang’s confident demeanor while playing alongside Kim, she promised herself that “when she comes to the LPGA Tour, I’ll be there to support her.” Her friend, amateur powerhouse Ahn Yeon-ju, describes Hyo-jin as “a friend who can smile 24 hours a day without pretense.”
At a family event to end the year on December 31 last year, Yang surprised her family by revealing her ambitious goals.
She announced her “Hyojin Yang Project” to become a national champion in 2023, the No. 1 amateur in the world in 2024, the KLPGA Tour Rookie of the Year in 2025, the KLPGA Tour Grand Prize, Money Prize, and Lowest Stroke Award in 2026, and to play on the KLPGA Tour for four or five years and then move to the LPGA Tour and go from Rookie of the Year to World No. 1, Grand Slam, and Hall of Fame.
Her next goal was interesting: “I want to be a commentator like Park Se-ri and appear in entertainment programs.”
In pursuit of these dreams, the up-and-coming golfer starts her mornings with a 2-3 kilometer run at 5am. She runs up and down the 100-meter stairs of a nearby university several times. Her college-aged sisters and brothers shake their heads at the sight of the stairs.