Alexa Moncada

Is the ability to design golf courses a gift or an acquired talent? That question is open to debate but creating golf holes from the land certainly requires a passion for doing so.

Passion is something Alexa Moncada has in abundance.

Born in San Diego, Moncada grew up in Tijuana, Mexico, and started playing golf at age 7 with the encouragement of her father, a recreational golfer. She told Rick Woelfel on the Wonderful Women of Golf podcast that by the time she was 10 she knew she wanted to make golf her career.

“I was telling people, ‘I’m going to work in golf, I don’t see myself doing anything else,’” Moncada recalls. “I ended up reading about and wanting to research golf course architecture, and wanting to know and see what that was. And ever since I can remember I was telling people that’s what I was going to do.”

Moncada played tournament golf until she was 15 but found she preferred being around the game and the people in it as opposed to the stresses of tournament competition. A wrist injury that kept her off the course for a year also impacted her decision to step away from that side of the game. But Moncada’s passion for golf course architecture was unabated, especially after she picked up a copy of Tom Doak’s book, “Anatomy of a Golf Course.”

“That book became my bible” she says. “I read it through and through, probably about 10 times in one year.”

Moncada eventually emailed Doak, who advised her to obtain experience working in golf course maintenance. She applied for an abundance of internships and landed a position at Pinehurst Country Club in Denver in the late spring of 2022. She calls the experience as her “first real job.”

“I got there,” she says, “and I didn’t even know how to turn on a mower. They taught me everything from turning on mowers to mowing grass, growing in a green, cutting cups, fertilizing, everything. They really took their time to teach me all of that. It was supposed to be a three-month internship. I ended up staying for nine months.”

When that internship ended, Moncada moved on to North Carolina, where she worked at Pinehurst Resort. She served as an intern under Doak and Angela Moser, the lead architect on Pinehurst No. 10. Moncada arrived in North Carolina in January 2023.

“It was amazing,” she says. “There were white stakes everywhere marking the tees, middle of the fairways, and the greens. The green stakes had a little green line on the top.

“I remember walking the property for the first time and it was all staked out. The trees were cleared for most of it. There were a few shapers doing a green here and there, but it was mostly property with stakes.

“I have pictures of all the stakes and pictures of the way it turned out and the way they can look at what are basically trees and say, ‘This can be a par 5,’ or ‘This can be a par 3.’ That kind of creativity is amazing.”

Having the opportunity to learn from Moser made Moncada’s time at Pinehurst especially rewarding.

“It made me feel very welcomed,” she says. “It wasn’t as intimidating. When I first got to Denver, I was very intimidated by, ‘I’m the only woman there.’ Going to Pinehurst and being able to live with Angela and just be around her, I was less intimidated, like, ‘I’m not the only girl here.’

“It was an amazing experience, and I have a lot to thank Angela for. She was amazing. She taught me so much, not just about golf course architecture but about the industry in general. Getting to know her and see how she works, it was an unbelievable opportunity.”

Moncada remained at Pinehurst through August 2023. In April 2024, she moved on to an internship Spanish Bay, though she returned to Pinehurst to volunteer at the 2024 U.S. Open.

When she spoke with Wonderful Women of Golf, Moncada had completed her internship at Spanish Bay and was preparing for another assignment at a location she was not at liberty to disclose.