When Mirabel Ting accepted the Gaelle Truet Rookie of the Year Award on Sunday at Indian Wells Golf Resort, she didn’t get to walk off the stage. She was asked to stay right where she was, because the night wasn’t finished with her yet. Moments later, the 21-year-old from Miri, Malaysia, was handed her 2027 LPGA Tour card as the No. 1 player in the season-long Race for the Card, capping a rookie campaign that also earned her 2026 Epson Tour Player of the Year honors.

For the second straight season, one player has swept both of the Epson Tour’s top individual awards. Melanie Green did it in 2025, becoming the first player to claim Player of the Year and Rookie of the Year in the same season since 2016. One year later, Ting matched her, closing her first full professional season with two wins, a dozen top-10 finishes and a solo-second showing in the season finale.

Ting’s rookie year did not start like a Player of the Year campaign. She opened with a T46 at the Atlantic Beach Classic and a T33 at the IOA Golf Classic, and she arrived on the Epson Tour carrying the sting of falling short at the Final Stage of LPGA Q-Series the previous December.

The turnaround came quickly. A closing 66 at the Orlando Health Championship in March delivered a T4, and from there Ting became a fixture near the top of leaderboards: solo ninth at the Reliance Matrix Championship, T3 at the FireKeepers Casino Hotel Championship and a third-place finish at the Great Lakes Championship.

In July at the Hartford HealthCare Women’s Championship presented by Munich Re, she showed the resilience that would define her season. After a second-round 76, Ting answered with back-to-back bogey-free weekend rounds and 12 birdies over her final 36 holes to finish solo second, one shot behind Christine Wang.

“I feel like I was patient enough on the golf course,” Ting said afterward. Patience became the word she returned to all year.

The first win came in August at the inaugural Smoky Mountain Championship presented by Food City at Green Meadow Country Club, where Ting and Rachel Kuehn finished tied at 15-under. On the first playoff hole, from 155 yards, Ting was leaning toward an 8-iron before her caddie talked her into a different club. She hit it close and rolled in the birdie putt for her first Epson Tour title.

Three weeks later, Ting made it two. At the Dream First Bank Charity Classic in Garden City, Kansas, she led after each of the first two rounds, then pulled away on Sunday with four birdies in a five-hole stretch on the back nine (Nos. 10, 11, 13 and 14). She closed with a 66 to finish at 14-under 202 and win by three, becoming the first player on tour to win twice in 2026. The victory came and it moved her to the top of the Race for the Card.

“To get the second win is actually, I would say, pretty hard still,” Ting said with a smile.

She never gave up the No. 1 spot. Along the way she Monday-qualified into the LPGA Tour’s Walmart NW Arkansas Championship and finished T15, an early look at what she can do at the next level. At the Epson Tour Championship, she played her way into the final group on Sunday and finished solo second, one shot back, to lock up the top spot in the standings.

Ting’s golf story starts with her grandfather. He introduced her to the game at age 5, taking Mirabel out for quick nine-hole loops after school. He funded their junior tournament schedules.

The road since has been marked by loss. Her grandmother died in 2020 while Mirabel was in Australia. In October 2022, just weeks after she moved to the United States to begin her freshman year at Augusta University, Ting was riding in the team van to her first college tournament when she learned her father, Thomas, had died of a heart attack. She flew home to Miri to grieve with her family.

When she returned, she found a way to honor him. In her first collegiate start the following February, she won the Moon Golf Invitational, holing a 54-foot eagle putt in a playoff, and dedicated the victory to her dad. After transferring to Florida State, she became one of the best players in college golf, winning the ANNIKA Award, the PING WGCA Player of the Year award and ACC Golfer of the Year honors.

Then, in July 2025, came another blow. Before announcing she was turning professional, Ting flew home to tell her grandfather in person. Days later, as she sat at the airport preparing to leave for her professional debut at the Amundi Evian Championship, she received word that he had died.

“This week’s going to be bigger than myself,” she said that week in France.

Through all of it, her family has stayed close. Her sister, Michelle, has been on the bag throughout her rookie season, offering guidance on the course and a steady presence off it. Ting has spoken openly about how much she has had to grow up on her own.

“I’ve been independent since my dad passed,” she said after her first win in Tennessee. Asked what her father would have told her, Ting said she believed he’d keep it simple: enjoy it, then get back to work, keep practicing and earn a spot on the LPGA Tour.

On Sunday in the California desert, she did exactly that.

Ting joins Green as the second straight rookie to claim both of the Epson Tour’s top honors. Green parlayed her 2025 sweep into a full rookie season on the LPGA Tour in 2026. Ting will follow that same path in 2027, carrying two Epson Tour titles, a No. 1 Race for the Card finish and a family story that has followed her from the fairways of Miri Golf Club all the way to the stage at Indian Wells.