These South Florida twin golfers have excelled on the golf course and in the classroom

Jake Beber-Frankel and his twin sister, Phoebe, don’t necessarily remember it. But when asked who picked up a golf club first, they both had the same answer.

“We don’t remember the very first time but there are videos of us when we were about two years old,” Jake said. “We’re in the backyard swinging and we both have clubs in our hands so it was pretty much at the same time.”

“Sometimes it almost felt like we were born with a club in our hands,” Phoebe said.

Their parents might not have known it at the time, but they had created quite a twosome in Jake and Phoebe, who took to the sport and excelled at it at a very high level.

When they grew older, eventually they took not only their golf talents but academic abilities to a high level to Ransom Everglades, a traditionally high-academic K-thru-12 private school in Coconut Grove.

This month, like so many other high school students around the country, Jake and Phoebe, both outgoing seniors, won’t be able to enjoy any graduation ceremonies because of social distancing guidelines warranted by the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak.

But that doesn’t mean they aren’t headed forward to great success in the future. Much of that is thanks to how hard they worked not only in the classroom but on the golf course as well.

Jake Beber-Frankel, who was named the Miami Herald’s Male Golfer of the Year in Miami-Dade County at the May 27 Virtual Awards Ceremony, is off to Palo Alto, California in the fall where he will play for the same golf program Tiger Woods played for — Stanford.

Finishing with an unweighted 3.8 GPA (out of a possible 4.0), Jake actually had the proverbial “pick of the litter” as he had more than a dozen scholarship offers but took just three visits, Duke and USC being the others.

“Ever since I was seven or eight, I was asked where I wanted to go and I said Stanford,” Jake said. “I don’t know why, maybe in the back of my mind it was because Tiger [Woods] went there and it was one of the best academic schools in the country as well so that’s where my sights were always set.”

This particular record is not kept in the official FHSAA record books but the list of golfers who qualified, either individually or with their team, for the high school state golf tournament six consecutive years would have to be an awfully short one.

That’s exactly what Jake did as he became a regular at the Mission Inn Resort in Central Florida every year since he was a seventh grader.

He finished in the top 10 three of those six times topped by a third-place finish last fall when his 72-72, 144 total was just three shots shy of being an individual state champion.

“Neither of us got into it too seriously until maybe when we turned seven,” Jake said. “That’s when our dad hired a coach [Mike Myles] and things took off from there.”

Asked if the game ever became a grind for him, Jake Beber-Franked did not hesitate.

“For me, I fell in love with golf early on and became a range rat. I just kept hitting golf balls and never lost interest. Golf was definitely something I loved to do, especially playing tournaments but at the same time, it made me incredibly frustrated because I also had a temper and would get super angry. That’s something I really had to learn to control.”

As passionately as Jake chased that little white ball around the course, his sister’s path was a little different.

“Our coach [Myles] was also a tennis coach as well,” Phoebe said. “When he first started coaching us when we were seven, I kind of liked tennis as well. But then he stopped coaching tennis and became strictly a golf coach so I guess that took care of that.”

For awhile, it looked like Jake might be the only one to excel at the sport. That was until an eight-year-old Phoebe discovered that if you play well in tournaments, you actually get trophies.

“There were times during that first year I absolutely hated it and would not ever want to go to practice,” Phoebe said. “But then we started playing tournaments and they would give you trophies if you played well. I really liked that part and it wound up becoming a huge motivator for me.”

Like her brother, Phoebe would become a regular at the state high school tournament as well, qualifying five of six years between seventh grade and 12th grade. (She missed out in her eighth grade season). Her highest finish was as a ninth grader when she finish T-5 and also came in solo 10th as a sophomore.

But even though her golf resumé was nearly as stacked as her brother’s, Phoebe has chosen a different path for her future that may not necessarily include golf.

She is set to attend Barnard College, a private women’s liberal arts college located in the heart of Manhattan in New York City this fall.

“I kind of always had this fantasy about the northeast schools including the Ivy League schools,” said Phoebe, who finished with a 3.85 unweighted GPA and recorded a 34 on her A.C.T. “Our parents actually met at Harvard and it was this long beautiful love story. While I still love golf, I wanted to choose a school that I could go to academically and fall in love with academics. Golf would have to be second.”

And that it will be. Because Barnard does not have a golf team, Phoebe will be able to try and walk-on at nearby Columbia University if she chooses to do so.

“Right now it’s just getting my feet planted academically at the school,” she said. “Then we’ll see what happens with golf down the road.”