Over the past year, Mason Howell has attended classes at Brookwood School in Thomasville, Georgia, from eight to three on weekdays. He’s taken tests and turned in papers. He’s hung out with friends and gone to senior prom. He also played in the U.S. Open Golf Championship, won the U.S. Amateur Championship, and played on Team USA at the Walker Cup. And this week, he’s headed to Augusta National.
As the eighteen-year-old said on the Golf Channel while playing the Houston Open in March, “Right now I think I’d be in statistics class, so definitely glad I’m out here on the range at a PGA Tour event.”
Since receiving his first set of clubs at age five, the golf phenom has risen through the sport’s ranks and earned the reputation as one of the most exciting young players to watch. Here’s what to know about Howell ahead of the start of the Masters—which comes a month before his high school graduation.
He started out skipping stones in South Georgia.
There were early signs Howell was headed for athletic greatness. As an unusually coordinated toddler, he learned to skip rocks across the surface of a lake near his South Georgia home, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It wasn’t long before he was using plastic clubs to hit stones, and then wiffle balls. His parents knew he needed a real set of clubs, and at age five he parred a hole for the first time.
He is used to being the youngest.
At age twelve Howell quit other sports, including tennis, to focus on golf, reports Golf Weekly. As a sixth grader he played on the varsity team of his school. In 2022 he took top prize in the 13–14 category at the Future Masters, and the year after, he took home the Billy Horschel Junior Championship. Last spring, he helped lead Brookwood to a state title, plus claimed the Georgia Independent Athletic Association’s individual state title. In 2025, at seventeen, he was the youngest player on the course in the U.S. Open.
He’s the third youngest player to win the U.S. Amateur.
Byeong Hun An took the title just before turning eighteen in 2009, and Danny Lee did it just after turning eighteen in 2008. In August 2025, Howell won it—by the largest margin in a decade—at eighteen years and a month, pushing Tiger Woods into fourth place in the lineup of young greats.
His caddie at the Masters is his high school coach.
Howell’s primary caddy is Jimmy Gillam, who serves as one of Howell’s high school coaches and his short-game instructor. Gillam is an assistant pro at Glen Arven Country Club in Thomasville, where Howell broke the course record at age fourteen, shooting a 59. Howell attributes his success at the U.S. Amateur to Gillam’s counsel, and they’ll be teaming up again at Augusta National. The pair visited the course earlier this year to suss it out. “It’s definitely surreal prepping on a golf course like that,” Howell told the AJC. “I mean, the beauty of it is unmatched. As good as it looks on TV, I tell you, it looks better through your own two eyes.”
He’ll soon be a Dawg.
Howell will be staying in state for college. Last fall he announced a verbal commitment to play for the University of Georgia on social media, posting, “Grateful to coach [Chris] Haack, coach [Jim] Douglas and coach [Mookie] DeMoss for giving me the opportunity to become a Dawg.” He’ll join the UGA golf team in the fall, but in the meantime, he also qualified for his second U.S. Open and the British Open later this year.
Lindsey Liles joined Garden & Gun in 2020 after completing a master’s in literature in Scotland and a Fulbright grant in Brazil. The Arkansas native is G&G’s digital reporter, covering all aspects of the South, and she especially enjoys putting her biology background to use by writing about wildlife and conservation. She lives on Johns Island, South Carolina.
