Sports Illustrated and Empower Onyx are putting the spotlight on the diverse journeys of Black women across sports—from the veteran athletes, to up-and-coming stars, coaches, executives and more—in the series, Elle-evate: 100 Influential Black Women in Sports.

There have been only a handful of golfers from Flint, Mich., to make it to the professional ranks, and even fewer who have played a LPGA-sanctioned competition. Shasta Averyhardt made that list in 2011 when she earned her LPGA Tour card while being only the fourth African-American woman at the time to earn tour status. A trailblazer in her own right, Averyhardt was just getting started.

Her love for the game started to form around the age of 7, when her father, Greg Averyhardt, would take her to play on the public courses when he got home from work. Even though Flint was mostly a blue-collar municipality, there was still a demographic divide; and that divide was seen on the golf spectrum of who played at private country clubs and who played on the city’s public courses. Even with that distinction, at a young age Averyhardt felt right at home on the fairway. “We had so many golf courses,” she recalls, “and there were always so many kids playing with their parents, learning the game. So that was a very normal environment for me up until middle school and a little bit of high school.”