In somewhat of a play on Nike's famous motto, it shouldn't come as any surprise that I believe Michelle Wie just needs to stop. She needs to stop playing golf, stop taking advice from her father, stop listening to the blowhards he's hired to "manage" her career, and just go off and be a teenager for a while. She has the weight of the world on her 17 year old shoulders and she needs to escape it to have any chance of future success, beginning with going to Stanford and being a college kid.

Wie's had a golf club in her hands since age 4. She blew through a couple amateur championships and ended up playing along side Hall of Famer Annika Sorenstam in 2003. She's played in tournaments as an amateur and as a professional. She's played LPGA events and PGA events. She's finished as high as 2nd and as low as being disqualified from an event. For someone coming into the game with the label of a prodigy, the inconsistency is killing her. She has been unable to show any real progress in her game since announcing her intent to become a pro in 2005.

There can be no improvement continuing to play against the men. While she may have the driving distance and strength to hit a golf ball 300+ yards, she has no where near the level of accuracy and mental fortitude necessary to defeat the likes of Tiger Woods or a Phil Mickelson. She has enough trouble regularly making the cut on the Women's Tour. These continued efforts against the men are like watching Don Quixote tilting at windmills. She is doing more to hurt her game than help it by continuing to play in these tournaments and finish in dead last on Friday and miss the cut. She can't continue to play half tournaments and improve herself. She must make the weekend and consistently feel the pressure of weekend golf in a tournament setting.

I admit that some of this is not on her. While it is necessary that she goes out and live up to the hype and to the expectations that she has put on herself by signing those endorsement contracts, some of the greats of the game have done nothing but pile on her. Ernie Els, Fred Couples, and even the great Arnold Palmer have all heaped her with praise. She has done absolutely nothing to warrant Palmer's assessment that she will one day be greater to the game of golf than Woods. I don't know whether it is her not taking the game seriously, her belief that because everyone says she's great that she is, or what, but there is some deep-rooted issue with her game that she is incapable of working out.

Continuing to play on the LPGA is also not the proper place for Wie to be regaining her focus and regaining her competitive edge. There is too much pressure there as well seeing that her sponsorships have already paid her $10 million. She must perform and perform well to continue to be worth that kind of money. The best place for her to find her game again is at the NCAA level. This is a girl that does not know how to win. She does not have that knock out punch in her like many of her opponents possess. It can be learned however, and this is why she must hand over all her sponsorship money and regain her amateur status under NCAA rules and play golf for Stanford University beginning this upcoming season. Hey, it worked for Woods.

One thing remains clear whether she decides to continue her professional career while a student or whether she decides to put her aspirations aside while in school – she must take control of her career away from her father. Whether she decides to hire a professional agent or to run it herself, she must never again take another piece of advice from him or the people he has hired to run her career for her. None of these people are qualified to run their own careers let alone the career of someone who should be one of the world's most gifted athletes.

They should never have made her play in any of the PGA events she has competed in, they should not determine which tournaments she will and won't compete in on a weekly basis – she needs to play them all. She must have rounds of competitive golf under her belt if she is ever to improve and become the player everyone pictures her becoming. The scattered play is not doing her any favors. These people, including her father don't know anything about proper golf etiquette, either. They have caused her to have issues with Tour officials, other players, and just about everyone else involved in the tournaments she does play in. They should all be banned from the Tour. If she is going to ever see success, she must find people that will do what is in her best interest and not her father's.

She must surround herself with successful golf people. Her father is not one of these people. He knows almost nothing about the game other than that he can make himself wealthy at his daughter's expense. He has put an untenable amount of pressure and stress on her shoulders. It is no wonder that she has begun to crack. Again, this says nothing about the continued fact that if she wants to be successful, she needs to go out and play good, solid golf. All her father has become is another obstacle to that goal. It is on her to make the decision of whether or not she wants to be a great golfer. If so, she may need to end her relationship, one I believe to border on an abusive one, with her father. Yes, abusive.

It is abusive of him to push her to go pro. It is abusive of him to make her play in these PGA events. It is abusive of him to have forced her to continue to compete when injured. And if you don't think that he's been pushing her, you are blind. I think she has a better understanding of her game than he does. He sees dollar signs. His view of the golf course is clouded by them. I believe that if she had any say in the direction of her career, she would have spent more time playing against people in her age group and moving up and playing some more at the amateur level. I believe that she would make the decision to play NCAA level golf as well.

Basically, she would have taken the Tiger Woods route. It not only would have given her the chance to play on a very consistent basis, something that isn't true in her current standing as a non-LPGA pro, but it would have taught her that killer instinct she lacks, the one that Tiger and his peers, as well as hers, have. She would learn to win and win consistently. Her father believed that all she had to do was show up and the paychecks would rain down like confetti from heaven. They're both learning a very hard lesson. Her lesson is harder than his – that even family don't always have your best interests at heart.

She is beginning to make the right decisions for herself. The first is deciding to go to college. She does two very positive things in this one move. The first is getting away from professional golf. She needs to step away and remove herself from the burdensome pressure the game has placed on her at such a young age. She escapes the endorsements. She escapes the questions about her mental and physical toughness. She also escapes the bounds of her father and the “experts” he has working on “her” behalf. Maybe now it can be about Michelle Wie and not about B.J. Wie. These moves will give her the opportunities she's failed to have thus far in both life and career. Neither can be worse than she's already faced.