The USGA’s Julia Pine always wanted a career in sports and she’s made it a reality.
By Adam Schupak
Back in 2015, Frank Moore held a team off-site meeting where members of his staff at the Southern California Golf Association were asked to draw a picture of their ideal workday.
One of those staffers, Julia Pine, a Bay Area native, drew herself at U.S. Open Final Qualifying site, sketching TV trucks and reporters that she assisted at “Golf’s Longest Day.”
“We talked about it and she said she loved the energy of the day, the human-interest stories that she helped uncover for Golf Channel and other national golf publications,” recalled Moore, the longtime communications and marketing director for the SCGA. “It’s no surprise that she looked to the USGA for her next opportunity.”
Indeed, just a few years later, Pine manifested her dream day into her full-time job, including overseeing the communications strategy for U.S. Open Final Qualifying, not to mention the U.S. Open and U.S. Women’s Open, among the 15 championships the association oversees. In October, she was promoted to the USGA’s senior director of communications and content, adding responsibilities for the brand side, including handicapping and Green Section. She’ll attend upwards of six championships in person, highlighted by a three-week stretch in June that will take her from coast to coast: the U.S. Women’s Open and Curtis Cup in Los Angeles and the U.S. Open on Long Island.
Pine cut her teeth at the SCGA but she has Northern California roots so we count her as one of our own. She moved from New York to Berkeley when she was 10, which was a return to the Bay Area for her father who had grown up in San Francisco. She still speaks fondly of attending the Athenian School, a non-traditional high school in Danville, that helped shape her world view while shepherding a dream of being an ESPN SportsCenter anchor. Golf wasn’t yet part of the picture, and her dream evolved from in front of the camera to something more behind the scenes at Loyola Marymount University, where she became the sports editor by the second half of her sophomore year and majored in English with minors in Journalism and Ethical Studies. She served as beat writer for the men’s basketball team and treated the school paper as if it was a full-time job. However, when she graduated, journalism jobs were sparse and so she decided to cast a wider net after asking herself a critical question: Is it journalism or sports that she wanted to pursue?
Despite lacking a golf background, once she determined it was her passion for sports that should fuel her career, she applied for a P.J. Boatwright Internship with the SCGA. Moore was part of the selection committee, but the group chose a different candidate — "a more golfy one," she was told, for the prestigious internship. Pine still has the rejection email saved. Moore, however, had another opening on his team and reached out a few days later to the applicant who in one breath had touted her accomplishments as editor of her sports paper and in the next dished on the L.A. Clippers game from the previous night.
“You can teach a lot of skills, but you can’t teach passion,” Moore said. “I knew I had to have Julia on my team.”
Pine proved to be a good listener with a strong work ethic in a profession that requires 24/7 commitment. She spent the next seven years at the SCGA, taking on the role of editor of Fore Magazine, the SCGA’s quarterly magazine and plusFore digital, where she put Max Homa and Andrea Lee on the cover before either became a big deal, and launched a women’s newsletter that addressed issues targeted for that audience. Her fingerprints remain all over the SCGA.
“I still consider Julia an extension of our team,” Moore said. “She has served as an official and unofficial adviser.”
While she hasn’t picked up golf as her sport of choice to play, the game and the human-interest stories associated with an individual sport got in her blood and the move to the USGA was a natural progression. In 2017, she attended the Walker Cup (at L.A. CC), U.S. Women’s Amateur (San Diego CC) and U.S. Amateur (Riviera) in her SCGA role and the USGA communications staff witnessed her in action. It proved to be a three-event tryout and by the time she interviewed, the job was hers.
Golfweek senior writer Beth Ann Nichols has been in regular contact with Pine for nearly a decade since she joined the USGA and described her as detail-oriented and a problem solver. “Sometimes you get told ‘that’s just the way it is,’ but I’ve never heard that from her,” Nichols said. “I’ve never worked with anyone who has delivered the answers I need quicker. I don’t know when she sleeps; she’s so plugged in.”
Nichols admires how she keeps a tidy e-mail box but Pine dismissed that as par for the course. “To me, that seems like that should just be a pre-requisite of the job,” Pine said. “If just responding to people makes you exceptional then other people have to do a better job.”
Pine has done some of her best work after a USGA champion has been crowned. It has become standard operating procedure in recent years under her watch to take the winner of the USGA’s biggest championships on a full-blown media tour. Pine whisked J.J. Spaun, the 2025 U.S. Open champion, from Pittsburgh to New York City the day after his surprising victory, where he did a dozen interviews ranging from The Today Show to ABC News. But she also realized that several of the female champions have been A-list stars back home in their native country and in 2019, she led Jeongeun Lee 6 to South Korea, where her fan club waited at the airport with signs. She added stamps to her passport accompanying the U.S. Women's Open trophy and Min Jee Lee to Australia and Yuko Saso to the Philippines. In doing so, Pine has helped raise the profile of women’s golfers and done her part to make the biggest women’s championships treated with the same level of respect as their male counterparts. It’s no easy trick but it’s just the way Pine always drew it up.