LATER THIS WEEK, the students of greater Aiken, S.C., will return to school, and the weekday caddie yard at Old Barnwell will empty.
Across enormous green fairways and inside bunkers shaped like dinosaur bones, it is usually not hard to find the teens of Aiken at Old Barnwell. They lumber around the golf course like percussionists in a folk rock band — their steps thumping against the hardened earth and their bags clanking with the sweet symphony of iron against iron.
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Happen upon a game at Old Barnwell and you’ll quickly realize that it is not like other private golf clubs. Happen upon a conversation with one of Old Barnwell’s caddies and you’ll find out why.
All of Old Barnwell’s caddies are kids. All of them are local to Aiken. None are professionals or lifers. And some of them need the job more than you could ever know.
The point of the caddie program at Old Barnwell is “to benefit the caddie,” the club’s founder Nick Schreiber says. Often, that’s all it is — a chance for a well-to-do golfer to teach a kid from a modest small town a thing or two about life.
But the magic of the caddie program at Old Barnwell is that sometimes that’s not all it is. Sometimes the teaching goes the other way around.
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“You know how bad things come in threes?” One of the caddies, Daniella Penaloza, asks me on the day of my first visit.
I tell her I’m not sure they do.
“Well, they do,” Daniella says, and when I ask her why she’s so certain, she pauses.
“A few years ago, my dad died, my uncle became a quadriplegic and my grandpa was diagnosed with Stage IV prostate cancer.”
She laughs.
“And then I had to figure out high school.”
Okay, Daniella. I’m listening.
THE QUESTION hovered over Daniella for so long she began to forget what life looked like without it.
Eventually, someone worked up the courage to ask her.
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How are you going to pay for college?
“I don’t know…” Daniella said, pausing. “Probably FAFSA?”
Truthfully, there wasn’t a clear answer. Daniella knew that college tuition was a fortune — around $125,000 for a four-year in-state school, in some generous accountings. She knew her mom worked as a lunch lady. And she knew that her dad had left behind some money when he died suddenly in November 2022, but not college-tuition money.
“Honestly,” she said. “I try not to think about it.”
Money wasn’t the only thing. In the wake of her dad’s death, Daniella stepped away from their shared pastime, golf, entirely. For a long time, she wondered if she would ever return.
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“After he passed, I didn’t touch my clubs for … god knows how long,” she says now. “A really long time.”
But then one day, something called her back. Not passion exactly, but something equally motivating: cash. She’d heard through her old swing coach, Pat Milkovich, that a new private club up the road was hiring students as caddies, and paying pretty good for it. She met with the club’s caddiemaster, Alex Beegle, for an interview.
“I didn’t know, initially, about her story,” says Beegle. “I was just hiring caddies and trying to get the box ticked. Right when she walked in at 7:50 on that first Saturday morning, I could just tell she would be great for the job.”
It didn’t take Daniella long to realize she was pretty good at it, too. Even by the standards of a blue-collar family, Daniella was a natural-born hustler. She didn’t mind the grunt work of hauling golf clubs, and she liked how caddying was proportional: The more effort you put in, the more money you made. Before long, she’d earned the club’s attention.
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“About a year ago I started getting emails from members saying, ‘I had this caddie, she’s incredible,'” Schreiber said. “I got enough of them that I said ‘okay, I gotta meet this girl.‘ When I finally met her I was like, ‘oh, wow. I get it.'”
As the members tell it, Daniella was a walking contradiction. She was a teenage girl in a man’s job, standing five-foot-three next to a group of strong-and-growing boys, and she carried golf bags so low to the ground they sometimes scraped the turf. But she was a natural to the unspoken traditions of caddying — of lifting your player up and managing their mistakes, of being a welcome voice in the ear and not a pest buzzing around it, of carrying much more than the bag. In other words, Daniella was a veteran caddie, and she happened to work at a club with very few of them.
When she talks about what she learned in her first summer as a caddie, Daniella grins.
“It’s fun when you’re doing good, it’s also kind of fun when you’re doing bad,” she says. “But, like, not really.”
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By her second spring, caddying had morphed from a job into a sense of purpose. For the first time in Daniella’s life, she had earned a reputation … and her family tragedy had nothing to do with it.
“I have to say it comes from my family. My mom can’t stay still, my dad couldn’t, my uncle couldn’t, no one,” Daniella says. “It was always, put 110 percent — put 150 percent. You never just do 100 percent. Never. That was just something I grew up hearing.”
Her growth took an unexpected turn in early April, when she drew a loop with a member named Barry. They were chatting about life on the 16th hole when he turned to her.
“What are you doing tomorrow?”
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Daniella had seen lots of strange behavior from men before on the golf course, but never like this. Was a guy in his sixties really about to ask her out on a date?
She stammered out a non-committal answer, and Barry looked confused.
“Well, if you’re interested…” Barry began. Uh oh.
“…If you could swing by and grab these final-day tickets at Augusta National, they’re yours,” he said. “I’d love to give them to you.”
As it turned out, Barry worked in the golf business, and kept a very soft spot for caddies. Daniella’s hustle and skill had moved him. Thankfully, he had the perfect gift: Tickets to the final round of the Augusta National Women’s Amateur.
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The next morning, Daniella called out from work and made the 45-minute drive from Old Barnwell to golf heaven. She and a friend spent the day at Augusta National with Barry’s tickets. For free.
Daniella, allergic to the suggestion that her courage and gumption were anything other than required components of her operating software, still struggles to make sense of these moments, and her effect on people. She returned to high school golf and was quickly elected team captain despite having one of the highest scoring averages on the team. But when she was asked why she thought she made a good captain, she shrugged.
“I think they just love me,” she said. “But I want to show these girls that I’m more than my background.”
In the end, not even Daniella could deny that she had a gift for forming unusual bonds around golf. Particularly not as her senior year of high school approached, and Daniella learned that her mother was planning to move home to California.
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It was an understandable decision, but it left Daniella on an island. She felt like she belonged at Old Barnwell, not in California. But she was still in high school. What could she do?
Then one day, a stranger approached. His name was Ed Brockner, and he had a very unusual proposition. Brockner was a golf lifer, having spent a decade with the First Tee in New York before Nick Schreiber, the club founder, hired him away to become the “mission director” at Old Barnwell.
Brockner had heard about Daniella’s situation. He’d also heard that her future in Aiken was in question. He knew it sounded crazy, but he and the rest of the club at Old Barnwell really wanted her to stay, and they had a good reason for it.
As luck would have it, Old Barnwell had a new philanthropic effort at the club designed explicitly for star caddies.
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“It’s called the Evans Scholarship,” Brockner explained.
Daniella wasn’t familiar.
“It’s a scholarship for caddies,” Brockner said. “And if you get it, they’ll take you to college.”
Daniella said she’d have to think about it. It wasn’t until months later that she explained the reason for her trepidation.
The offer sounded too good to be true.
ON THE MORNING of March 4, 2026, Daniella Penaloza arrived at Old Barnwell and prepared for the biggest interview of her life.
It was nine months after her initial conversation with Brockner. Six months after she’d elected to live with a friend’s family in Aiken for her senior year of high school. And mere weeks after she’d learned that she had advanced beyond the application stage and into the final interview for the Evans Scholarship, a nationwide caddie scholarship fund that pays for its recipients’ full tuition, room and board.
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Even for an audacious teenager, the final interview for the Evans Scholarship is designed to be intimidating. The interview takes place in front of an entire chapter of scholarship officials and local golf power brokers, and often asks the candidates to divulge their most vulnerable moments. (The Evans Scholarship is a needs-based scholarship; the students in the running almost always have a story of adversity to share.) At the conclusion of the interview, all applicants are asked to answer the same, final question — a question that is said to speak volumes to the applicant’s character and aptitude: What would an Evans Scholarship mean to you and your family?
Daniella was nervous, but more than that, she was ready. For all the years she’d caddied, she’d secretly been carrying much more than the bag. She’d carried the weight of her grief, her uncertainty, and her future. Now she was clinging to a chance to make much of that weight disappear.
When the final question arrived, Daniella leaned forward. She took a deep breath before she started speaking. The room was quiet.
“To me, it would mean everything and more, because I know what I’ve gone through,” she said. “It’s an overwhelming feeling.”
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“It would feel like, oh my god, it really did pay off,” Daniella said. “After four years of hell, you’re fine. You’re not suffocating any more. You can just breathe. It’s okay.”
It was the answer Daniella had practiced giving for weeks, but she was so overcome by the moment she barely remembers saying it.
She does remember what happened after, when she touched her hand to her face, and was surprised to feel the tears streaming down her cheeks.
After Daniella stepped out of the room, the dignitaries prepared to cast their vote on her Evans Scholarship application. Before the tally was counted, one of the men in the room interrupted the proceedings.
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“There’s a banner here that says for all who love it,” he said. “I was under the impression the ‘it’ was golf.”
He paused.
“It’s clearly a hell of a lot more than that.”
As he wiped a tear of his own from his face, the man looked around at the room.
“She may be small,” the man said. “But she is mighty.”
THEY TOLD HER it could take a week.
Then, three agonizing days after the interview, her phone buzzed. It was Paul, who lives at her old house in Aiken where some of her mail still goes. He’d sent a picture of an enormous FedEx envelope.
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Daniella drove the ten minutes to Paul’s house with the music off, retrieved the envelope from the mailbox, and stared at the paper as it sat in the passenger seat.
She’d originally made plans to open the envelope with her best friend. She was still outside of the house when she abandoned them.
In lieu of a witness, Daniella propped her phone on the dashboard and pressed record. She tore open the envelope to reveal a caddie flag, a pin, and the most valuable piece of paper she’d ever received.
For a few quiet moments, Daniella sobbed alone from the driveway of the home she no longer lived in. The celebration for the greatest accomplishment of her life would have to wait — her family was still asleep on the West Coast, three hours behind her.
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So she drove to work, back to Old Barnwell, and prepared for another loop. Within minutes she was greeted in the caddie yard by the loving embrace of another family: the one who’d adopted her.
Alex Beegle, the caddiemaster, was the first to see her. After months of playing the stoic caddiemaster, the quiet tough guy, he finally cracked. He stunned Daniella — and most of the caddie yard — with a hug.
“All right, come here,” he said. “You earned this.”
The Evans Scholarship is a big deal at Old Barnwell. It’s the highest honor any caddie can receive at the club — an honor signified by a royal blue bib. At a ceremony in her honor, Daniella was gifted hers. When she was asked what it meant, she did not speak about college or her future. She spoke about her past.
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“They’ll always have your back like they had mine,” she said. “Every single step of the way.”
Classes began at the University of South Carolina on Tuesday for some 7,800 freshmen. Daniella was one of them, beginning a four-year degree in occupational therapy on a full Evans Scholarship.
It won’t be long until Daniella’s friends at Old Barnwell hear how it all went. When she’s not learning, Daniella will make the one-hour journey back to the caddie yard in Aiken to pick up loops throughout the fall.
“This place is my family,” she says. “It’s my home away from home.”
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Family is one of many reasons Daniella will return to Old Barnwell even though her bills are paid. Knowledge is another. Daniella says you can learn a lot about life in a round of golf.
As it turns out, she’s right. Especially when you’ve got a caddie showing you the way.
You can reach the author at [email protected].
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