Paige Spiranac spent her childhood working towards a career as a professional golf player, but gave up her dream just one year after achieving it.

Paige Spiranac has revealed the reasons she gave up on her dream to become a professional golf player.

Spiranac is the most-followed golf star on the planet, boasting 3.7 million followers on Instagram.

While she currently focuses on content creation around the sport, there was a time when Spiranac was aiming for a career as a professional golf player.

She did turn pro for a year after finishing her studies at the University of Arizona and San Diego State University, but revealed it left her “mentally exhausted”.

What did Paige Spiranac say about her time as a professional golf player?

Speaking on her Playing A Round podcast, Spiranac opened about the efforts she made to get better at golf as a child.

“From the first golf ball I ever hit, I dedicated everything I had to being a pro golfer,” she said.

“I was homeschooled. I practiced every single day, morning until night. It was my only goal. I was a highly ranked junior golfer and then at 18 I had to make the decision to go to college or turn pro.”

It was decided that Spiranac would go on to study, allowing her to play collegiate golf, but she explained that she lost her passion for the sport while playing at San Diego State.

“So many growing pains,” she explained. “I was burnt out of, I wouldn’t say golf, just dedicating my life to something and not really seeing the results.

“Golf is such an interesting sport because you can work out, eat right, practice and still not achieve your goals. That was something for me that I just couldn’t wrap my head around.

“I just got to the point where I just stopped caring. I wanted to have more of a social life. I wanted to have fun.

“I was tired of dedicating my life to something and just not seeing the result. So when I was playing at SDSU, I just lost my desire for it.”

Spiranac then became a social media sensation, missing out on her degree after failing to finish her last semester of college.

“I then got the invite to go play in Dubai,” she said. “I blew up there. I did one year of playing golf professionally and I was just mentally exhausted.

“In golf, you fail more than you succeed and I was doing that in the public eye. Everyone was telling me, ‘You should quit. You should give up. You’re not good.’

“All of these things, and I was already dealing with these mental issues of years and years and years of trying so hard and coming up short and I just broke.

“I honestly cracked. I broke and I just stopped. I said ‘maybe I’ll go back,’ and I’ve never gone back to try and play golf professionally again.”

Will Paige Spiranac play professional golf again?

Although Spiranac has been extremely successful at creating golf content on social media, she revealed she is kept up at night by the idea that she was a “failure” as a player.

“If I had the choice to be doing what I’m doing or play on the LPGA Tour, I would probably pick the LPGA Tour because that was just a goal that I’ve always wanted to achieve and it was a dream of mine,” she said.

“I wish I could’ve checked that off before I went over into doing media work full-time. But that’s not how life works.”