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GREENSBORO — Molly Plomaritis abbreviated golf career at Grimsley paid off for both sides.

For the Whirlies, it meant consecutive top-five finishes in the state. For Plomaritis, it reminded her that golf didn't have to be a lonely walk.

“Here, you immerse yourself,” she said. “It's not about me, it's about us. It changed my perspective. You can play as well as you can play, but you still have to rely on your teammates.”

Plomaritis, who finished 14th in the state as a junior and sixth as a senior, became the first female golfer in school history to earn a Division I golf scholarship, signing a letter of intent to attend Georgetown on Wednesday. Georgetown was the only school to which she applied, pulled by an attraction she still has trouble articulating.

“It was definitely a risk,” she said, “but I didn't want to go anywhere else.”

Plomaritis was born into golf — she has three older brothers, “and she wanted to do everything they wanted to do, and do it better,” her mom, Maureen Ward, said. At 13, Plomaritis enrolled in the IMG Leadbetter Golf Academy in Bradenton, Fla., a boarding school for promising young players in which Plomaritis quickly discovered a hyper-competitive environment.

“It's all about you,” Plomaritis said. “It's very selfish, but you have to be.”

When she left IMG after two years, Plomaritis said she was ranked 80th in the nation for her age group. But a health scare for her grandmother prompted Plomaritis and her mother to move to Boston, where opportunities to play golf were less plentiful. Ward recalls taking her daughter to a golf dome in the middle of winter and asking someone to turn the heat up.

“Lady,” an employee said, “this is the heat.”

After more than a year up north, Plomaritis had fallen from the national rankings.

“It was really upsetting to me,” Plomaritis said. “It was everything I had ever done with my life.”

Whirlies head coach Joe Franks remembered Plomaritis as “a child prodigy” from her days at Kiser Middle School, but by the time she returned to Grimsley for her junior season, it had been years since she played golf on a team. Though she had the best pedigree, Franks suggested bringing her into the mix slowly to minimize the impact on team chemistry.

Plomaritis agreed to start the season down the depth chart, taking time with beginning players on the range and spending her first match chatting up an opposing Chilean player in Spanish, which she picked up in Florida.

“An awful lot of kids would have been selfish,” Franks said. “She's not one of them. She was never that way. She has an immense natural ability, but she also loves the game and works very hard at it.”

Plomaritis flourished under Franks and volunteer assistant Mikael Hogberg, a former PGA European Tour player whose daughter Elin will also graduate from the team this spring.

The Whirlies tied with Northwest Guilford for second at the 4-A state meet in 2008 and tied for fourth this season, with Plomaritis following a third-place regional finish by shooting a 6-over 152 to take sixth at Foxfire Golf and Country Club.

“We wanted her to feel like she was part of a family,” Franks said. “The way Molly handled it made it very easy for things to go very, very well.”

Contact Tom Keller at 373-7034 or tom.keller@news-record.com