Ask anyone who ever has played a round of golf — competitively or recreationally — and that person can tell you how frustrating and unnerving the game can be.

For an expert opinion, talk to Kansas University women’s golf coach Erin O’Neil, a veteran of the LPGA Futures Tour. This week, the tour will come to town for the Lawrence Futures Golf Classic at Eagle Bend Golf Course.

“It’s not an easy life by any means,” O’Neil said. “I had sponsors, so I was able to just go play and not necessarily worry about making a check every week. Fortunately, I didn’t have to re-pay my sponsors, either.”

O’Neil was sponsored by a country club in Findlay, Ohio, where she worked for four summers while in college.

As a golfer at the University of Georgia, O’Neil was the Southeastern Conference Freshman of the Year in 1994, a three-time first team All-SEC selection, led the Bulldogs to two conference titles and recorded the second-lowest single-round total in school history with a 66 at the 1997 SEC Championships.

But after college, it was back to the bottom.

O’Neil played on the Futures Tour for three seasons, a job she said was not a decent living. Instead, the Futures is a developmental tour, with the top five finishers each season receiving automatic tour cards for the LPGA and the next 10 skipping the first stage of the next year’s LPGA qualifying school.

O’Neil saw the highs and lows of the Futures Tour, earning as much as $3,000 in one weekend as well as taking home a check for as little as $50.

In the winter of 1998, O’Neil played a stint in the Kosaido Ladies Asian Tour, but it was when she came back for the 1999 Futures season, her third and final on tour, when she had the first of two epiphanies.

O’Neil had spent 15 consecutive weeks on the road in her Jeep Cherokee, which contained everything she owned, and was put up in private housing for a weekend tournament.

“I was staying at different people’s houses every week, and I woke up one night towards the end and didn’t know whose house or what town I was in,” she said. “I was like, ‘you know, this is not where I wanted to be.'”

After nearly earning her LPGA card the following offseason at qualifying school, O’Neil got away from golf completely and waited tables for a year in Tampa, Fla. But the itch for the links came back.

“It made me realize I know it’s who I am,” O’Neil said. “I had had a great experience and great coaches. I wanted to be able to do that same thing.”

O’Neil was an assistant coach at former SEC rival Auburn University from 2000 to 2004, and last September was given her first head-coaching opportunity at KU.

And with the Futures Tour coming this week to Eagle Bend, O’Neil’s journey will come full circle. She will participate in Thursday’s pro-am, then the rest of the week she will support two of her former Auburn players on the Tour — Danielle Downey and Courtney Swaim.

But as this week’s event may stir memories for O’Neil, she says there were no regrets about giving up her playing career.

“I gave it everything I had,” she said. “It made me a better coach.”