WHEN golf coach Nancy Harvey first met the young man who would change her life he was so tiny that all she could see of him was his fingertips curled around the top of the shop counter.
He was accompanied by his father Chris, who clutched in his hand a voucher he’d received, entitling his son Billy to a free golf lesson at Emerald Lakes on Queensland’s Gold Coast.
Harvey was in the right place at the right time and, as she led the five-year-old to the range, she asked him about his hopes and dreams; about what he wanted to do when he was older. He replied that he wanted to play on the US PGA Tour.
“I said ‘Come with me, Billy. I’ve got a special space for you right here in my heart’.”
That was 15 years ago, and not a day passes that Harvey doesn’t give silent thanks for a ‘sliding door’ moment that led to a continuing player-coach relationship she describes as ‘very special.’
The youngster was Billy Dowling, currently fresh from a victory in the Australian Amateur Championship in Perth and a regular contender in Australian PGA Tour events for the past couple of years. He’s arguably the best amateur golfer in the country.
Nancy Harvey with star pupil Billy Dowling, the 2026 Australian Amateur champion.
And Harvey, who now conducts her golf coaching at Royal Pines, where she once contested the Australian Ladies Masters, is enjoying the ride – spending as much time with him as she can, sharing her knowledge, and guiding her young charge as he contemplates the awesome possibilities of his future in golf.
Harvey marvels at his maturity. “When we started he was like this little old man in a child’s body,” she said. “He was so keen, so driven – a captive audience.”
Nancy Harvey’s own story began in Canada, where she first started playing golf at the Elmwood Golf and Country Club in the town of Swift Current. A quick learner and tenacious worker, she made the Saskatchewan junior team at 16, and within three years was Canada’s 10th best junior golfer.
In 1984 she finished eighth in the Canadian Amateur Championship and was rated her country’s No 6 female amateur – strong enough credentials to earn her a scholarship at Arizona State University, where her golf team placed second and third in successive NCAA championships.
After she graduated, a car accident delayed her plans for a professional career but, in another of those serendipitous moments, directly led to her becoming a golf instructor.
“I was in my car, driving behind friends after playing in a tournament in Arizona,” she said. “We came to a stop light, and stopped. But a car following didn’t, and hit me from behind at about 45mph.”
She suffered cervical and dorsal sprain and strain, more commonly known as ‘whiplash’, and took more than two years to recover.
In the meantime, she and her then husband, teaching professional Glen Harvey, ran a busy municipal golf course called Dobson Ranch in Mesa, Arizona.
It was there she discovered a love for coaching, and found inspiration in the teachings of Glen Harvey.
“He was my only coach, and he was a very good one,” Harvey said. “He would tell me ‘you can always teach but you can’t always play’, so I went to work getting my game in shape”
Harvey said she mainly taught men, with only a handful of women on her roster. No juniors at all. “Children made me nervous,” she said. “I didn’t know what to say to them, or how to reach them.”
When her body had healed she resumed competing and was runner-up in the 1987 LPGA Teaching and Club Professional Championship.
In 1988 she qualified for the LPGA Tour, where she competed against the world’s best golfers for the next two decades. Her best year was 1997 when she finished second twice, once at the Welch’s Championship in Boston and also at the Sara Lee Classic in Nashville where she lost in a sudden-death playoff to Terry-Jo Myers. She also carded her first hole-in-one.
Harvey first visited Australia in 1994, playing in the Australian Women’s Open at Royal Adelaide – won by Annika Sorenstam and contested for the first time as a professional by Karrie Webb. She enjoyed the experience because she always had an interest in Australia, the people and its golf courses.
Nancy Harvey, now coaching at the Royal Pines Resort on the Gold Coast.
Nancy eventually moved to Australia in 2009, relocating to the Gold Coast and accepting a coaching position at Emerald Lakes. She discovered she really did have a knack for teaching young golfers, taking a lead role in managing the academy’s junior programme.
After four years at Emerald Lakes, Mark Gibson offered her a role on his coaching team at Royal Pines. “It was a great chance for me and I was happy to move here,” she said. “Fortunately, most of my clientele moved with me.”
Harvey speaks fondly of her association with the talented Sugiyama sisters – Momo, 24, and Sakura, 22 – with whom she’s worked for nearly 16 years.
Momo, who completed her studies last year at Purdue University in the US and made it to the matchplay stage of last year’s US Women’s Amateur Championship, has just qualified to play on the JLPGA.
Sakura, a graduate of the University of North Texas, has been playing on this year’s WPGA circuit, carding an ace in the Webex Series event on the Murray River, and making the cut the following week in Sydney.
“Those girls work just as hard as Billy,” she said. “I love that all three are good people first. They’re my family. I never had children of my own. Those three are as close as I’ll ever get,” she said.
“They have great work ethics and we’ve built such special relationships,” she says, her pride in all three obvious to all.
Harvey marvels at Billy’s passion for golf, and she’s excited about his future in the game. She says he’s working hard to develop his body and become strong enough to handle the rigour of regular professional tournament play.
She points out that he’s leading the PGA Affiliate Future Tour category, with enough ranking points – courtesy of a runner-up finish in the Queensland PGA and top 10s in the Webex Series events in Perth and Victoria – to secure a card on next year’s PGA Australasian Tour.
And she acknowledges there’s not much left for the 20-year-old to conquer in the amateur ranks.
