‘Surreal’: 70 Chicago-area high school seniors receive full-ride scholarships through golf caddying

One day in December, high school senior Sarah Adebayo looked at two pieces of mail before her feeling a combination of stress and excitement.

One was a letter from Northwestern University, her dream school.

The other, a package from the Evans Scholars Foundation.

Both held important information about her future: Would she attend her top-choice college? Would she receive a full-ride scholarship, lifting a huge financial burden off her single mother?

Adebayo, who immigrated to Rogers Park from Nigeria as a baby, opened the Northwestern package first to find a disappointing rejection. But then she opened the Evans package.

“I was like, ‘Am I reading this right?’” Adebayo, 17, told the Chicago Sun-Times.

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She had received an Evans scholarship covering four years of tuition and housing at her choice of more than 20 colleges.

Charles “Chick” Evans grew up in Chicago caddying at the Edgewater Golf Club and was the nation’s top amateur golfer by 1916, when he won the U.S. Open and the U.S. Amateur.

Adebayo, a caddy at Bryn Mawr Country Club, and 21 other students from the city of Chicago worked through their high school careers as golf caddies under the Evans Scholars program sponsored by the Western Golf Association, eventually earning full-ride scholarships.

The Glenview-based association hosts the BMW Championship as part of the PGA tour. Since 1930, the association has sponsored more than 11,000 students to go to college.

Each summer throughout high school, the students in the program spend several weeks living with other students, working as caddies and prepping for college entrance exams. As caddies, the students wake up at 6 a.m. each day to carry heavy bags, walk all 18 holes and assist golfers during their games.

Of the hundreds of caddies selected for the scholarship this year, 70 are from the Chicago area, according to the association.

Adebayo, a senior at Loyola Academy in Wilmette, plans to pursue a biology major when she begins college in the fall, though she’s still deciding where she will go. She says she struggled with social anxiety and conversing with strangers before becoming a caddy.

Now, the chit chat comes easily.

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“I was just walking along the field with the golfer, and I just thought, ‘Wow, I’ve come a long way,’” she said. “A few years ago, I was nervous, I made mistakes, and I was still learning things. … [The mistakes are] what you learn from in the future.”

For scholarship recipient Anthony Gomez, who attends John Hancock College Preparatory High School in Clearing and caddies at Park Ridge Country Club, finding friends he calls brothers was a bonus of the time he’s spent as a caddy.

“Everyone there, you start to build a family,” he said, adding that the group would hold potlucks in the summer to introduce each other to foods from their various cultures.

“It’s surreal,” he said of being selected for the scholarship.

The son of Mexican and Ecuadorian immigrants, Gomez, 18, keeps himself busy playing volleyball and basketball, helping the John Hancock College Prep basketball team to its first conference title in 20-plus years last week.

He’s awaiting his decision from the University of Notre Dame, where he hopes to study finance or data science and then pursue a career helping others improve financial skills.

“Especially in the Latino community, I want to give back,” he said.