From Spain To Mississippi State Star
June 10, 2022 | Women's Golf, Joel Coleman
Julia Lopez Ramirez has quickly become a Bulldog women’s golf standout.
STARKVILLE – It was kind of a quiet ride.
This was last August. Mississippi State head women's golf coach Charlie Ewing, along with assistant Lauren Whyte, were on their way back to Starkville with special cargo. They'd just picked up a pair of the newest Bulldogs from the airport in Birmingham, Alabama, and were making the trek back westward.
Freshmen Julia Lopez Ramirez and Ana Pina Ortega, both of Spain, were the rookies in the vehicle, and they weren't saying all that much.
"The whole drive back, there were hardly any words," Ewing recalled. "They had very little to no confidence in their English. It was still very much developing, and they were learning how to communicate as best they could."
But then…
"A few days after that, I remember some of our players were joking," Ewing said. "They were like, 'You know that first day they were here, we went to breakfast and we couldn't get a word out of them. Now two weeks later, we just can't get them to stop talking.'"
In no time, the duo was comfortable.
Fast-forward to the present and Lopez Ramirez isn't just fitting in at MSU. She's fresh off of perhaps the best freshman season ever put together by a Bulldog women's golfer.
"I feel like I've played really good with the team and also individually," Lopez Ramirez said. "It's been a really good season for me."
The Accolades
Lopez Ramirez's rookie resume speaks for itself. Here's the rundown.
She became the first-ever Mississippi State women's golfer to claim the Southeastern Conference's Freshman of the Year award. She also earned First Team All-SEC honors, as well as SEC All-Freshman Team accolades.
This past season, Lopez Ramirez won the SEC's Golfer of the Week and Freshman of the Week award two times apiece. Her three tournament wins, as well as her stroke average, were tops among all SEC freshmen.
There was national recognition as well. Lopez Ramirez was tabbed a Women's Golf Coaches Association Honorable Mention All-American. She was also placed on the WGCA National Freshman of the Year watch list.
And Lopez Ramirez's explanation for how all these things came her way?
"I just try to be the best for me and also for my team," she said.
Lopez Ramirez means it, too. It's not lip service. She's wanted to be the best individually and collectively since her very first collegiate event.
The Sam Golden Invitational
It was mid-September in Denton, Texas. It was about a month since that silent car ride from the airport to Starkville, but folks were about to hear loudly and clearly from Ramirez.
She'd already started becoming herself off the course.
"She talks and talks and talks," Ewing said. "She's full of personality."
At the Sam Golden Invitational, Lopez Ramirez made her presence known on the links.
She posted seven birdies and an eagle on the event's final day to tie for first and earn an individual co-championship in her Bulldog debut. And to get a clearer picture of just who Ramirez is, get this. She didn't even know she'd ended the day at the top of the leaderboard. She was more concerned about the Bulldogs, not herself.
"Coach Lauren goes, 'Julia, you won,'" Ewing said. "[Lopez Ramirez] goes, 'What are you talking about?' Coach Lauren says, 'You won', and Julia goes, 'I thought this was only just a team tournament.' She had no idea there was an individual aspect to college golf. She just came over here to be a teammate and play on a team. I think that really says a lot about her and her role on the team that she wants to serve."
Lopez Ramirez remembered it this way: "They told me, 'Hey, you won.' I was like, 'What?'"
Lopez Ramirez learned she could win individual championships that day. However, it didn't change her approach at all. Not even a little bit.
"She still kind of maintains that same mindset of – of course she's won three times and she loves that she's won – but she's really, really devoted and dedicated to making sure the team is performing at the highest level that we can and really cares about that," Ewing said. "That's really what she's focused on every time we tee it up as a team. It's, 'What can I do as a teammate to bring the most out of everybody?'"
Lopez Ramirez won individually again in the spring opener. She broke the MSU record for lowest score after 54 holes as she shot 16-under-par to win the Paradise Invitational title down in Boca Raton, Florida.
Three weeks later, Lopez Ramirez won another individual crown at the Westbrook Invitational in Peoria, Arizona. The triumph ultimately led to a Mississippi State team championship as well.
It was a season full of highlights and incredible moments for Lopez Ramirez. But just what exactly has made her so good so soon?
The Skill Set
When Lopez Ramirez came to Mississippi State, she arrived as one of the world's top amateurs. Then, she put on the maroon and white and backed it all up.
But how? Why has she been so great at such a young age?
"She's got more club head speed than most women in the game around the world," Ewing said. "And it's not just at the junior level or collegiate level. The club head speed she has is extremely rare to find."
Ewing explains more:
"Obviously, club head speed goes a really long way in golf, but it only goes that far if you know what to do with it. She has incredible control with the club head speed that she has.
"And what we've seen from her this year as a whole is she's taken a lot of ownership in growing and maturity and decision making on the golf course. She's a very aggressive golfer. She knows how to play aggressive in a very mature way. It's not reckless. She does a really good job at knowing how to play aggressive. If for some reason she doesn't execute the shot perfectly, she has a plan to give herself a high likelihood the miss is going to go somewhere she can still play from. So, she's really developed a lot in maturity. It's really helped her out a ton and really pairs well with her aggression and club head speed.
"And when you get her in competition, she's just extremely competitive. She has such high standards for herself and she just competes at such a high level that when you get her on the green and around the green, she's just really adamant about finding a way to get the ball in the hole and just has a don't-be-denied mentality."
As good as she is – like most elite competitors – Lopez Ramirez knows she still has areas to improve. It's near the hole where both Lopez Ramirez and Ewing see room for growth.
"She really wants to continue to fine-tune her short game and become a more consistent putter, become more consistent at wedge play and a more consistent chipper," Ewing said. "I think those are really the areas she wants to nail down and sharpen as she steps up into that professional level down the road. More than anything, just try to continue on the same path. She wants to become a better course manager. She likes to challenge herself to get better in all areas. But the areas she always talks about with us, we try to find out a plan to help her improve, is on the green and around the green where she challenges herself the most to get better and hopefully pick up a lot of shots in that area over the next few years."
The Mindset
Oddly enough, maybe the best way to illustrate how Lopez Ramirez is committed to being the best is to look at her football skills. Yes, football.
"She just absolutely has taken a liking to football and really embraced this Mississippi State thing because obviously, when you come over from Europe or Spain, you have no understanding of what it means to be a baseball fan or football fan or basketball fan in the SEC," Ewing said. "But she's really taken a liking to it."
In fact, Lopez Ramirez likes football so much, she's now incorporated it into her warmup routine prior to tournaments.
"We'll get out of the van, and we'll throw the football in the parking lot," Ewing said. "She loves to run the go route. So, I'll try to lead her with a go route and she catches it and every time she catches it, she'll tuck it away and run through the goal line."
Lopez Ramirez has developed into a pretty dependable parking lot receiver. And now, she can even throw the football, too. It didn't start out that way.
"Oh no. I didn't know how to throw a football," she admits. "I was really bad at it at the start."
But guess what? She was committed to improving.
"The first time she ever threw it, it wasn't good enough," Ewing said. "It didn't spiral like everyone else's did. [Lopez Ramirez and Pina Ortega] said it just drove them crazy."
Not so much anymore. Lopez Ramirez quickly figured it out.
"Ever since then, we like to start in close and throw and kind of get the spirals tight," Ewing said. "Then she'll go on her go route. I have to be careful, because if I overthrow her, she might run herself into a parked car or something like that. She's pretty determined to go get the ball."
And that determination is what makes it where, even after a freshman campaign like no other in MSU history, the sky is still the limit for Lopez Ramirez.
"She really is a great leader and a great teammate," Ewing said. "One thing that does stand out from a golf-specific side of things that might be her greatest quality is her standard for herself is so high that when she finishes a tournament, her feelings about the tournament are genuinely not dependent on if she wins or if she's top five or top 10. It's totally dependent on her own standard. That's what she's driven by.
"There's a lot of times where she'll – from a scoreboard standpoint – look like she's had a really good tournament. But she'll leave with a certain level of frustration knowing she didn't meet her own standard. I think that's what drives her so hard and allows her to compete at such a high level is she just holds herself to such a high standard and she doesn't just beat herself down over it. She just pushes herself to meet that standard on a daily basis. That's really what's stood out to me over the course of the year and why she's such a great player and been so effective at a young age. She's just the furthest thing from complacent and that's really powerful for her and also really big in our program as well."
