CARLSBAD, Calif. — Megan Koibun is always ahead of the action.
As her son Jackson takes a swing and nearby fans look up to see where his ball goes, Meghan is already standing by a fairway or green with a clear view. To find out where Jackson’s ProV1 is, the answer is always “no”. 1 — I’m on my way. All she has to do is look at him.
“I’ve probably watched him play golf more than anyone else,” Meghan said. “I can still read him like a book.”
It was Jackson’s father, George, who introduced the game to Meghan as a way to give Meghan a weekend off when she was just a toddler. But by the time Jackson turned 4 and got used to winning medals in junior competitions and getting bobbleheads, golf was all he wanted to do. Back then, on a late summer night, Meghan sat at the driving range until dark, watching her son hit balls into the air.
“I’m just starting to get to know his game,” Meghan says. “I knew what he needed and wanted, the good signs and the bad signs.”
Next to the 16th green of La Costa’s North Course, the host course for the NCAA Championships where Jackson led the top-ranked Auburn Tigers, Meghan looked away for a moment and reflected on her son’s ascent.
The kid who used to show up to the course for casual rounds dressed like a pro, wearing a collared shirt tucked into his pants and cinched with a belt, is now the No. 1 amateur in the world. He had just put together one of the most successful golf seasons in school history, winning six times in three months and winning all national player of the year awards for the second time in his college career – a feat no one had ever accomplished.
“It was such an amazing drive,” Meghan said, her tears difficult to see behind her sunglasses, but her voice sounded like she was about to burst into tears. “We don’t put any pressure on him. He’s our only child and we gave him everything we could. It’s really great to see his dreams come true.”
Meghan stopped talking and looked up toward the high tee box just in time to see Jackson leaning on his pitching wedge on this short, downhill par 3. From where she was standing, she couldn’t see exactly where the ball was going to land, but she could tell right away if Jackson continued to follow through.
“He loves it,” Meghan says. The ball is about to go in.
Days later, Jackson helped Auburn win its second national title in three years. Shortly after, he announced that he would turn professional after his final tournament as an amateur, the 2026 U.S. Open, a year after earning his PGA Tour card.
That’s the end of Jackson’s story as an amateur. For golfer Jackson, this is just the beginning. But the sport hasn’t been kind to recent college standouts.
At this level, where Adam Scott is set to play his 100th consecutive major game and Scottie Scheffler is also present, golf requires more than just talent. The PGA Tour ignores college honors with the swift and brutal reality of miscuts, turning sky-high expectations into thorny troughs. Jackson has proven he can win at every level, but questions have been raised about whether he can do it on the PGA Tour.
“I believe my game is good enough,” Koibun told ESPN. “I feel like I can beat anyone. It might sound a little cocky, but at the end of the day, some of the best players in the world have that cockiness inside them. That’s what I’m going for.”
every weekday morningthe man behind Jackson Koibun’s swing woke up and headed to Cinnabar Hills Golf Course, just south of San Jose, Calif., to open a pro shop. Fred Garcia has been doing this same thing for 27 years now. At 66, he’s still a golf enthusiast who checks the tee times of his regular customers in the morning, freeing up his afternoons for his true passion: lessons.
In addition to working 40 hours in the pro shop, Garcia averages about 20 to 25 lessons a week. His rates are affordable at $125 per hour, and he’s fully booked despite having no advertising or social media presence.
“Everyone says we should charge more. They also say, ‘You’re Jackson’s coach, raise your prices!'” Garcia said with a laugh. “It’s not about the money. People always say, ‘You can retire,’ but I think as long as I’m here I can teach. I just love this job.”
It’s not enough to call Garcia Koibun’s swing coach. Just spend a little time around them and you’ll notice a deeper bond. Watching them walk from hole to hole during practice rounds, it’s clear that to understand the sport’s greatest amateurs, you need to know the quiet man shuffling behind him with a visor on.
“He’s a mental coach, a physical coach, a friend, a mentor, someone that JK really respects and trusts,” Auburn head coach Nick Clinard said. “He knows him inside and out, emotionally, mentally and physically. I think he’s a calming influence when things don’t go well, and he’s also someone who can be pretty tough when he needs to be.”
“None of us have mentioned his relationship with Fred,” Meghan said. “It’s a sacred space.”
Jackson began practicing with Cinnabar when he was 6 years old, and the two began working together when he was 10 years old. Garcia quickly realized that Koibun had a kid who was willing to spend every second on the golf course to win his next tournament, so he devised a strategy. While there will be a lot of work on technique and emphasis on everything from the long game to the short game, Garcia made a point of taking Koibun to the golf course and discussing every shot, scenario and decision. Garcia had Koibun play with older, better players at Cinnabar by age 13 to expose him to tougher competition.
“There were some issues. Going from a great run in the Bay Area to an AJGA event, there’s a lot of Jackson Koiban there, right?” Garcia said. “So he got beat up a little bit, but then he started winning.”
George and Meghan knew their son had talent, so they began expanding his activities, including taking Jackson to tournaments far from home to see how good he could be. In 2019, they took him all the way to Alabama, where he competed in the Future Masters Tournament, won his age division and impressed SEC coaches.
“Our job was to get him into the tournament because he kept winning,” George said. “The moment he felt like he was on top, he just kept getting better and better.”
When the Koibans decided to move from California to North Carolina four years ago, Garcia expected to hear that Garcia would have to leave him and find a local coach for Jackson. Instead, they called to ask how they could make it work. Then, the video call lesson and check-in began.
“Fred has a lot of faith in himself,” Meghan said. “Once I complained that Jackson was changing putters too often, and he just said, ‘Meghan, Jackson can putt with a Coke bottle. Don’t worry.'” Garcia still watches Koibun’s swing by phone from across the country, checking for any problems that need fixing. Garcia said it wasn’t a huge change, just tweaking simple things like ball placement, but one thing he noticed during their customary talk through recent tournaments was that Koibun was never satisfied.
“After a tournament that he wins, we’re going to FaceTiming and he’s going to show me his swing and ask me what I think, because he feels like he’s got some shots left,” Garcia said. “I say, ‘Jackson, you won by four points.'”
When Garcia is on the field, he walks every hole Koibun plays, often sneaking behind him on the tee box to videotape the line of his swing just in case. His cell phone contains an encyclopedia of videos of Koibun’s swings from before he was a teenager. His swing hasn’t changed, Garcia said, just as their North Star hasn’t changed.
“When we started, everything was built around doing whatever it took to get him ready to win the next tournament he played in,” Garcia said. “For him, it’s always been about winning. He doesn’t care about falling behind or coming in second. He wants to win. And he doesn’t just want to win, he wants to dominate. If he’s up by four strokes, he wants five.”
when he first time Jackson’s pedigree was obvious when he arrived at Auburn, but to Clinard and the rest of the Auburn staff, he was just 17 years old. Whether it was how upset he was by his own bad shots or plays, or how fast, or too fast, he played, the room for growth was clear.
“As a freshman, he was more raw,” Clinard said. “Now he has a lot more control over his emotions. He’s less dramatic. I think it’s part of the process, but you don’t want to put out the fire. If you put it out, he won’t be as good as he is now.”
With the help of Garcia and Clinard, Koibun learned to control his emotions and not let them affect his next shot. Once, in an attempt to slow down Koibun’s play, Clinard, who had walked with Koibun during his rounds all through college, refused to give Koibun a 30-second shot yardage to give Koibun time.
Just as Koibun’s parents responded to Koibun’s success as a child by taking him to bigger and bigger events to see where he stood, Clinard and Auburn challenged Koibun to not only grow for the program, but to help him prepare for the PGA Tour.
“He’s not playing for notoriety, he’s playing for trophies,” Clinard said. “You can tell he doesn’t just want to play on the PGA Tour. He wants to play in the Ryder Cup, he wants to compete in major championships, and he feels like he was put on this earth to do that.”
Looking back, it’s no wonder that when Koibun earned enough points and secured his card as part of the PGA Tour U program last May, his decision to turn pro or return to Auburn rested on something more than results. As Clinard said, at age 19, Koibun knew he wasn’t ready to sit in a hotel room with his mother after missing the cut.
“I knew I wasn’t ready,” Koibun said this week ahead of the U.S. Open. “I think that’s where my golf game was. I don’t think I was ready to graduate from college, I wasn’t mentally prepared for the challenges that could come, the travel, etc. But it was good for me to take another year to clear my mind. I’m definitely more ready now.”
photo of The letter is still on Meghan’s cell phone. In one, 10-year-old Koibun wrote to Titleist, asking if the club manufacturer had sponsorship opportunities for juniors. He asked what he needed to do to gain their support, including, of course, his tournament record. The other one is written for his parents and is more like an essay detailing why he needed a new putter.
“Even when he was just a kid, he had a very clear vision of who we wanted to be,” Garcia said. “He wanted to win on the PGA Tour. It takes that kind of belief to accomplish that.”
Chris Williams once held such beliefs. Fourteen years ago, the now Auburn assistant head coach found himself in a position exactly like top-ranked amateur and Ben Hogan Award winner Koibun. Williams turned professional in 2013, but through 2015 no player on the PGA Tour had finished better than T-30 in his first 10 starts.
These days, Williams has become another key figure on Koibun’s team, caddying for several of his PGA Tour starts, including last year’s U.S. Open, as well as being a sounding board for late-night conversations about everything from practice structure to what life is like on tour.
“Chris was there. He did it at the highest level and he failed at the highest level,” Clinard said. “He tells me what worked for him and what went wrong.”
After turning pro, Williams remained in Seattle and didn’t surround himself with people trying to improve him. He said he chased money and prioritized large sponsorship deals and sponsorships with various club manufacturers over sticking to what was best for his game. So Williams can speak as someone who has experienced what Koibun is about to experience.
“I thought, ‘I know you wouldn’t do that, but at the same time, I’m not going to make you make these mistakes,'” Williams said. “I think I have so much love for him that, in a weird way, I wanted to protect him from everything else that was going on.”
While Koibun remained an amateur last fall, he was able to secure exemptions to several PGA Tour events and was able to see where he stood before making the leap. However, Koibun was not simply happy to be there. He always wanted to measure himself.
“He’s a pretty anxious type of kid,” Williams said. “His freshman year, when he had perhaps the best freshman fall in Auburn University history, he came to our office concerned about his eligibility to be in the lineup.”
Koibun participated in the tour seven times as an amateur and achieved three top-10 finishes, but there is something different between the novelty of moonlighting as a professional and the reality of being on the field alone with no college team to return to. How does he manage his time on and off the course? What about quarantine? What about losing?
“For me, it’s just about finding acceptance in golf,” Koibun said. “Obviously, whatever event I go into, I’m going to try to win, but I’m going to try not to push myself too hard and accept that it’s not going to be a win every week.”
There is no surefire way to transition to the highest level of the sport, but Koibun’s team does their best to cover all the bases. They are well aware that PGA Tour rookies don’t always adapt well to their new lifestyle, and it often seeps into the game.
“He’s used to being alone, and I think we’ve been lucky to have time to build a team around him that pops up here and there,” Meghan said. “We’re probably going to come back to it more. As a mother, I have to let him go and make him understand. But our relationship has changed. He’s more dependent on things now because he’s like, ‘Hey, let’s get him to pay his taxes.'”
The extra year at Auburn helped Jackson prepare for the transfer not only mentally, but also logistically. Over the past year, he began building his own practice and also added Josh Gregory as his short game coach. Following advice from Williams and Lance Young, Williams’ former agent and Jackson’s current agent, Koibun transferred through the NCAA to Jupiter earlier this month. He’s a new addition to nearby Panther National, Justin Thomas’ course, and has developed relationships with other pros like Thomas and Russell Henry.
“I told him, ‘Spend time with Justin, be around him, go practice with him,'” Williams said. “I’ve just been encouraging him to be around them more often and get comfortable with them, because they’re going to push you every day.”
Winning has come naturally to Jackson throughout his life, but the Koibun family is careful not to let it become a given. They realize that winning at the next stage will not be easy, there will be more attention, more scrutiny, more pressure, and more effort will be required. The people around him do not have high expectations either. “I see him as a guy who’s probably going to be on the PGA Tour for 30 years,” Williams said. “He’s going to win several majors and win multiple times on the PGA Tour.”
view from above something else While Jackson sank another birdie putt, well away from the crowds on La Costa Hill, Meghan wondered aloud about her son’s cooking.
He’s good enough on the grill, she says, but hopes to get better at preparing more meals, not just to feed himself but also to create healthy pastimes. Fishing is one of the things he’s started enjoying in his off time, but gravity always seems to pull him back toward the golf course.
“He’s on the course by himself and I think he’s less nervous when there’s no one around him,” Meghan said. “I think that’s his downtime and when he can work on what he wants to do.”
Meghan knows that Jackson’s unwavering confidence and drive are part of what brought her son here. She is well aware that the golf course, which brings out his competitive nature, is where he is most comfortable, and she also knows that the sport he loved does not necessarily endear him back.
“He’s a perfectionist who plays an imperfect game,” Meghan said. “But he believes he is one of the best players and will continue to be one of the best players.”
Meghan has been watching Jackson from the front row for the past 21 years, often watching him from far down the fairway and checking his scores on her phone. No matter where it goes, up or down, she’s ready to see it happen.
