(CNN) "How you like me now?" say eight sassy golf whiz kids into the camera, accompanied by the catchy tune of the same name in the Netflix documentary, "The Short Game." The year is 2012 and the stars of the show are 1,500 seven and eight-year-old golf prodigies representing 60 different countries, all vying for a chance to become a U.S. Kids World Champion at the daunting Pinehurst course. Of the eight we meet up close, three are young girls , of whom two come first. Not that it's all about winning; it's a raucously fun movie designed to get kids into golf. It's stressful watching though -- the parent-child relationship shown in microscopic detail. When it was released in 2013, Augusta National had only just accepted its first two female members the previous year in former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and financier and philanthropist Darla Moore. Yet with the birth of two tournaments at Augusta before the Masters in April -- the Drive, Chip and Putt inaugurated in 2014 and the Augusta National Women's Amateur (ANWA) -- the game is clearly diversifying. Read More Junior golfers (age six to 17) in the US now total more than three million with more than one million girls, rising from 25% of the total in 2010 to 34% last year, according to the National Golf Foundation. Pano stands atop the podium after winning the Regional Finals Girls 7-9 section of the Drive, Chip and Putt competition. On a similar upward curve are Californian Amari Avery and Floridian Alexa Pano, now aged 17 and 16, who won at Pinehurst in their respective USK categories back in 2012. Nine years later, both made the 82-player ANWA field. "I want to be the first woman to play a tournament at Augusta. Girls are just as good as boys," says a measured Pano when we first meet her in the Netflix documentary -- the girl who is filmed practicing in the rain then shivering because she's freezing. She's the last to leave ...
About annika sorenstam
Millennials have almost no chance of being able to afford a house. This is what can be done
Annika Olson is the assistant director of policy research at the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at The University of Texas at Austin and a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project . The views expressed here are hers. View more opinion on CNN. (CNN) Picture this: you're driving around, furiously checking the GPS on your phone clipped to the air vent and pulling over at various points to check the laptop next to you, which is linked to your phone's hotspot. You're checking locations, addresses, prices, market fluctuations... all in hope of one thing. Landing a house. This has been my life for the past few months in Austin, Texas. Before work at 7 a.m., I check new listings that may have come on the market. "Check on Thursdays," real estate agents say. "That is when the best realtors will post. The house will be up for the weekend and gone by Sunday evening." Annika Olson They are right. I look at a house one day, and the next day a little red icon says "pending." Some say "contingent," which I had to Google. In short, I'm toast. The current real estate market is absolutely bonkers, and it is time that the federal government make moves to increase affordable housing. The Austin market, like many others around the country , is hot, like, really hot. This is the second year in a row Austin has been named the nation's top housing market by Zillow , with Elon Musk proclaiming that Austin will be the biggest "boomtown" the country has seen in half a century. Read More That's tough for me to hear. I've scrimped and saved for years, working for AmeriCorps for $1,000 a month and doing everything I could to build up my credit score and savings account so I could buy a house. But with inventory so low, it barely seems possible. My research -- including talking to people my age -- shows that millennials, are getting shut out of the housing market in large , ever-growing ...
Strong season could be turning point for CU Buffs women
Colorado had no plans of leaving Memphis, Tenn., without the Women’s NIT championship trophy. Despite falling short of that goal with a 65-56 loss to Mississippi in the WNIT quarterfinals on Monday night, the CU women’s basketball team was able to take a moment to reflect on a successful season that has signs of being a turning point for the program. CU’s final record of 12-11 overall, 8-8 in the Pac-12 Conference wasn’t stellar, but it was a major step in the right direction for a program that has struggled in recent years. In 2011, the Buffs joined the toughest women’s basketball conference in the country. At the time, they had a strong team led by one of the all-time great guards in program history, Chucky Jeffery. During those first two seasons in the Pac-12, Jeffery and then-coach Linda Lappe led CU to a combined 46-21 record, including 19-17 in the conference and a 2013 NCAA Tournament appearance. It’s been a struggle for the Buffs since then, but this season was CU’s best since Jeffery graduated in 2013. Remarkably, this potential turning point of a season came during a global pandemic, as the Buffs navigated COVID-19 and daily testing to rally together. “First and foremost, this is a remarkable group of young ladies to have sacrificed as much as they have for the opportunity to play basketball,” said head coach JR Payne, who completed her fifth season with the program. “They sacrificed a lot of their social lives and where they were living and what they were allowed to do and different things like that. “I think our athletic department made the same sacrifice. They gave us an opportunity, with the extensive testing and just everything that was built into allowing us to play basketball. It’s just all encompassing; it has been pretty incredible.” The pandemic shortened the season from what is typically 29 or 30 regular season games to 25. Then, COVID-19-related cancellations – mostly with other teams – eliminated more games. CU wound up ...
The fried-egg school of politics
Sign up to get our new weekly column as a newsletter. We're looking back at the strongest, smartest opinion takes of the week from CNN and other outlets. (CNN) In 1983, Rep. Pat Schroeder, a Colorado Democrat, was frying eggs in a nonstick pan one morning when she had an inspiration. Frustrated by then-President Ronald Reagan, she would later declare in a speech on the House floor, "He has been perfecting the Teflon-coated presidency: He sees to it that nothing sticks to him." Actually, at least one thing definitely did stick to Reagan: Schroeder's label. And Teflon, discovered by accident in a DuPont lab in 1938, proved versatile as a political tag. President Bill Clinton, for example, was "teflonish," Schroeder told CNN's Charles Bierbauer in 1997. Reagan's grandfatherly mien and Hollywood stage presence helped him weather two terms in office, though he did shoulder blame for many controversies. With President Joe Biden two-thirds of the way through his first 100 days, one emerging question is where he will ultimately land on the Teflon scale: as a president stuck with blame for the crises occurring on his watch — or one who largely manages to avoid it? At his first presidential press conference Thursday, "the President took tough questions from journalists without making any significant mistakes or verbal stumbles, defended his administration vigorously, and showed a deep and nuanced understanding of a wide range of issues -- and the politics needed for results ," wrote Frida Ghitis . In the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin observed, "Try as they might to seem 'tough,' the media did not succeed in knocking Biden off message. Biden spoke in great detail and length to show not only his mastery of the issues but also to suck tension and conflict out of the room ." Read More All around him, difficulties abound —a struggling economy he'd like to push toward a big recovery, the complicated ...
