As a teenager with unusual poise, confidence, and talent, Alexa Rancourt was not only ready to embrace the future, she was eager for it. Her passion was golf, and her skills were never more evident than when she won the Maine Women’s Amateur Championship in 2008 and defended her title the next year.
"Every time I step on the golf course, I get this massive smile on my face," she told me in 2009. "I just feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be."
Her ambitions were big. After attending high school at a prestigious golf academy in Florida, Alexa received a full golf scholarship from Furman University in South Carolina, a school with a reputation for excellence in the sport.
The next stop, if things broke her way, would be the Ladies Professional Golf Association tour, the highest level of the game.
It didn’t work out that way.
Three times, Alexa tried to qualify for a spot on the tour. Three times she came up short.
"It was a moment of reckoning for her, I think, after the third time in particular," Alexa's father, Michael Rancourt, said. "I’m not sure if it was a turning point or not. But it was definitely disappointing that she never got through—[disappointing] to herself."
Soon after Alexa, who had struggled with depression and other signs of mental illness in college, walked away from golf for good, moved to Hawaii, and dropped out of traditional society. She was using drugs, drugs that got harder as time went by.
"What she told me at one point," her father recalled, "was that she was looking for the bottom so that she would know how far she wanted to climb back up."
The climb back up never happened. In 2024, Alexa died of a fentanyl overdose.
The Rancourt family is now paying tribute to her with a major donation to the Maine Golf Center next to I-295 in Freeport. Crews broke ground last month on a $3 million, state-of-the-art facility called the Alexa Re Rancourt Golf Learning Center.
With a junior-friendly clubhouse, driving range, nine-hole course, and indoor simulator for year-round play, its goal is "to make the game more accessible to Maine youth and families of all ages, backgrounds and abilities."
"Her name is going to sit on that building," Michael Rancourt said. "Not so that people remember what a great golfer she was but what an incredible person she was, who was heartfelt in her victories and in her defeats, and who was also vulnerable."
Other individuals, foundations, and businesses contributed to making the project possible. The Center expects to open in 2027.
It will nurture golf talent, but even more important is the support and understanding it will offer to young people facing challenges, especially with addiction and mental illness.
"If we can do that for one person," Michael Rancourt said, "we’ve made a bad thing—a horribly tragic thing—something we can feel good about."
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