Tina Papatolis doesn’t need to go far to find motivation that keeps her golf game sharp and her ever-competitive spirit aflame. 

In her own garage gym, for instance, the lifelong athlete and softball player-turned champion golfer keeps a framed photo of herself that once graced the cover of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics magazine, in which, playing softball, she gives an amped-up expression and exclamation that can fire her up on any otherwise slow-moving day. 

Tina has lived a one-and-the-same life with sports. These days, she’s a self-proclaimed “golf junkie,” reading up on the latest relevant articles and seeking tidbits of equipment advice on YouTube. Living in Issaquah, Wash., the Toronto native regularly competes in WA Golf and PNGA championships, of which she has won three, all in Women’s Mid-Amateur competition. 

She often competes against, laughs alongside and rooms with some of her closest friends during tournament weeks. It’s family bonds like those that have helped her through what difficult times she has endured, like when she lost her father in 2022, the figure who was always there to support Tina as she navigated any given sport growing up. 

“We’re not afraid to support each other and help each other,” Tina will say. 

She’ll also say the list of sports she’s played throughout her life is longer than those she hasn’t. Golf is one of the means to keep that endeavor alive today, and as a self-proclaimed fiery competitor, Tina plays to win and has always been a thrill seeker in doing so. 

“I was the one that wanted to be up to bat in the last inning, with runners on, the game on the line, and it’d be up to me bring those runs in,” she said, referencing the rush that came with her softball experience. “I relished that.” 

Tina was born and raised in Toronto and quickly took a liking to the local teams, evidenced by a photo of her from when she was four years old, in which she wears a Blue Jays hat and Maple Leafs jersey while holding a tennis racquet in one hand and a softball in the other. 

“I just remember loving sports and always wanting to be the best,” she said of those days, adding that she’s always felt driven to be the best. 

Throughout her high school days, Tina was all-in on whichever sport was in season, be that basketball, volleyball, softball or tennis. Taking on prominent roles in each, she was eventually recruited across Canada to British Columbia and Simon Fraser University to play softball, at a program that was the country’s only one at the time. 

As for golf, she certainly has memories too, albeit not as competitive. Her first swings came with her father’s clubs to chip balls back and forth over a fence at their family cottage. Seeing progress, her dad made her a makeshift flagstick out of a broomstick and sand pail. All the while, Tina, a natural left-hander, was using dad’s right-handed clubs, not even aware of the existence of southpaw sticks until the age of 12 when her dad took her out on the course for the first time and rented her some. 

“I was in shock,” she joked. “I was like, ‘They make these left-handed?’” 

With golf on the backburner, Tina’s softball career at Simon Fraser came and went with a collection of accolades. Playing as a shortstop, Tina’s talents earned her First Team All-American honors and a place on the Canadian Women’s Senior National Softball Development Team for two seasons. She graduated in 2000, entering full-time work in the parks and recreation industry. 

But golf didn’t end after that. When Tina did dabble, she did so casually with friends, who often ran afoul of the USGA Rulebook. 

“It got kind of silly,” she said. “They’d hit one out of bounds and say, ‘Oh, I’m going to hit another, I’m going to hit another.” 

On her own, and without lessons, Tina learned to play by the rules and eventually got her handicap down to single digits. That made her eligible to join the Sweeny Cup in southern B.C., a season-long golf competition open to low handicap players. Maintaining a love for the Pacific Northwest, she eventually settled in Issaquah in 2015 with her wife. 

Tina competed in her first WA Golf championship in the 2017 Washington Women’s Mid-Amateur, and picking up the pace from there, she won that championship in 2019 and 2025, and the PNGA Women’s Mid-Amateur in 2023. 

In addition to that success, Tina’s extended golf foray introduced her to some of those closest friends of hers, as well as a pure benevolence of the community. 

In that 2017 Mid-Amateur, held at The Home Course in DuPont, Tina entered the championship just two weeks after bruising her ribs in a recreational softball game. Nursing the injury while playing the course’s tricky layout for the first time ever, she recalled how one of her playing partners provided her with a course yardage book to use. 

“It’s such a competitive setting,” Tina recalled thinking. “But to have somebody show that kind of kindness and sportsmanship, I just thought that was incredible.” 

Tina finished sixth that week and wanted “just more and more” championship golf after that. In the ensuing eight years, she got her three wins and qualified for the U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur four times. What bonds that have stuck during that time are akin to familial relationships.  

That long list of friends she’s made has perhaps been “the most incredible thing” of her taking up competition golf in Washington. 

“The laughter that we share together, the tears we’ve shared together,” she said. “It’s the purest form of friendship when you can be that raw with somebody and share those lows and those highs.” 

Still, losing her beloved father in 2022 was very difficult, and it affected her ability to process the stress and pressure inherent of competition, which she had long handled so well. 

“That gear that I could find to go to another level and dig deeper, it just wasn’t there,” she said. 

Eventually, Tina decided to get her first golf lessons this past April, under Erin Menath, director of instruction at Bear Creek Country Club in Woodinville, who Tina said made time specifically to take her lesson. Four more visits and a month later, she hoisted the Women’s Mid-Am trophy at The Home Course, where she first attempted it eight years ago. 

“If I beat this golf course, I’m going to be okay,” she recalls thinking ahead of the drizzly final round of that championship. 

At 49, Tina will turn 50 next February and be eligible for senior championships. As she continues her grind of watching equipment videos, learning from one of Washington’s finest instructors and being surrounded by her “sisterhood” of friends who she calls “each other’s biggest cheerleaders,” Tina knows there’s plenty to cherish. 

She also knows that, when she is on the course, the man who showed her the game is never, ever far away. 

“Sometimes, if I get a really good bounce, I point up top and say, ‘Thanks, Dad.’”