Even months later, Ellie Beavins remained in some state of denial. Surely, she thought, her father wasn’t really gone for good.
"At first, it was like, ‘He’s going to come back’ or ‘I’m going to go golfing with him again,’" she said.
Not until golf weather returned this spring did reality fully set in. Joel Beavins had always been his youngest daughter’s guiding light on the course, and Ellie had never really experienced the sport without her dad being physically present.
Gradually, she has come to accept that she’s now on her own out there — at least physically.
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In early October, just days after Ellie’s junior golf season at Franklin had come to an end, Joel Beavins lost his life in a plane crash in Michigan. The tragedy hit the entire community hard at the time — but for Ellie, it didn’t truly become real until springtime, when she got back out onto the golf course for the first time without her "right-hand guy" around.
It had been Joel who introduced Ellie to the sport when she was about 7 years old — and golf became her sole focus after she was diagnosed with a rare bone disorder, chronic recurrent multifocal osteomyelitis, that causes pain due to inflammation in the bones.
Ellie recalls not being able to run or jump for several months; she had two surgeries on her ankle as a result of the condition, the last just after her 10th birthday.
"Since I couldn’t run or jump or barely even walk," she recalled, "my dad was like, ‘Let’s go to the golf course.’"
Beavins has the condition under control now; she takes Humira weekly to help suppress its effects, and though she still sometimes feels some soreness after tough rounds, she hasn’t had any major physical setbacks in years.
The emotional setback of losing her father has been tougher for Ellie to cope with — especially this spring. She struggled through the Johnson County May Junior Tournament Series at The Legends, particularly that first round of competition.
"That very first day out … she cried on almost every hole," said Ellie’s mother, Jill Beavins. "She knew it was going to be hard, but I don’t think she’d really thought about it very much, and so when she got out there on the course, it completely overwhelmed her, for sure. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she would have walked off the course that day and just quit; it was the hardest round of golf she’s ever played."
Playing through the pain gradually helped Ellie get accustomed to playing competitive golf without her father, however, and as May turned to June, she quietly found her stride. Beavins paired with close friend and Franklin teammate Liv Parramore to finish third in the IGA Girls Team Championship on June 8, then rallied with a second-round 74 to claim victory at the Indiana Junior Golf Championship the following week at The Legends.
Perhaps not coincidentally, it was in the days leading up to that win that Ellie seemed to finally let some of her pent-up emotion out.
"Those three days leading up to that tournament were hellacious for her," Jill Beavins said. "I saw more anger, she sobbed — it was like all of a sudden, the dam opened up and it just all started coming. So she really, just in the last few weeks, has started to dip into that emotion. … I think it’s been hard for her to even fully wrap her head around the magnitude of the loss."
As part of the healing process, Ellie started to let others into her golfing circle, delegating some of the roles that had always belonged to her father. On the eve of her junior title run, she reached out to Crystal Morse, the head pro at The Legends and now a co-coach of the Franklin golf team alongside Ted Bishop, asking for some pre-tournament assistance.
"Before the (state junior) tournament that she won, Ellie had reached out to me and she was like … ‘Hey, can we just go out on the course, on the Middle Nine, and can you just watch me? I just want to get some club selections,’" Morse said. "I watched her play nine holes and threw balls down, just, ‘Hey, let’s play this scenario.’
"Her mom told me after the fact that that is what her and her dad used to do before a tournament. They used to just go out on the course the day before and just throw down golf balls, and he used to help her pick out her clubs and club selections. … I didn’t know at the time that that was something that she was used to doing with her dad."
Beavins has made other changes in her approach to golf this year. Her mother notes that in the past, Ellie would often go out in the summer and just play round after round — sometimes as many as 36 holes in a day. Now, the majority of her time seems to be spent on the range or the putting green practicing various shots or skills.
Jill Beavins hadn’t really put two and two together until she asked Ellie about why she’d been playing fewer actual rounds.
"She came up swinging," Jill recalled. "She was like, ‘Mom, do you have any idea how hard that is for me? In the past, if I had nobody to play with and I really needed to play, Dad went with me every time. The hardest thing for me is to go out and play a round all by myself.’
"There’s parts of that that she has kept really close to the vest that I had no idea."
On the eve of the final round of the Indiana Junior, Bishop gave Beavins a putting lesson and followed up with a text message that read: "Relax and have fun. I have never said this to you and I hesitate to, but you will always have your dad watching you. Be calm and make him proud."
That and the other events leading up to that point seemed to put Beavins into a better frame of mind. She parred the final seven holes of that tournament to pull out a one-stroke victory — one that Bishop called "one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long, long time" — then followed up with another win at the IGA Age Group Championship in French Lick on July 2.
Beavins started marking her balls with her father’s initials for tournaments and matches, and her social media posts after her recent victories included the hashtag #allforjoel.
"I definitely do all of this in his name," she said.
As the high school season approaches, Joel Beavins’ memory will serve as inspiration not just for Ellie, but also for her Grizzly Cub teammates — particularly those who were close with the family.
"It’s definitely a motivator," Parramore said, "just because Joel wanted us to do so well all the time, but at the same time he was not too intense about it — he just wanted us to have fun. So having fun and doing well is what we all want to do."
Despite her recent breakthrough, Beavins knows that her golf journey won’t be all rainbows and bunnies from here on. Some days are still harder than others, she says, and on certain days when she thinks that being on the course will be too hard, she might just decide to stay home.
There will undoubtedly be moments like that during matches or tournaments, but even though she doesn’t necessarily know when it’s going to hit her, Beavins feels far more equipped to make it through those rough stretches now.
"It’s just going to come," she said, "and when it does, I’m going to just thrive through and know that he’s going to watch over me."
