Leaning against a pillar at the entrance to the Moor Park clubhouse, Melissa Reid looks the picture of a young woman golfer. There is a hint of a smile on her face, a glimpse of fashionable bare flesh around her midriff. She likes the camera and clearly feels comfortable in its lens, moving from pose to pose without any sign of artifice or inconvenience.

And that is exactly what she is, a young woman golfer. At 20, she is in her first year as a professional and a favourite to be named Rookie of the Year. After coming second in the ABN Amro Ladies Open in Eindhoven two weeks ago, when she was one of only two competitors to have all three rounds in the 60s, Reid is ninth on the 2008 New Star Ladies European Tour money-list and yesterday she confirmed her potential by finishing joint fifth in the Tenerife Open.

Reid was first noticed by the English Women's Golf Association (EWGA) when she was 12 and by the time she turned professional last year she was playing off a handicap of plus 5, the lowest in Europe. She finished as leading amateur in last year's Women's British Open, outscoring Cristie Kerr, the US Open champion, by three strokes in the third round.

That really impressed Linda Bayman, the performance director of the EWGA since 1999. “I'm not bothered too much what they're like at 15, it's what they're going to be like at 30 that interests me,” Bayman said. “In my time we have not had anyone better than Mel. Golf needs an icon, someone to get the kids off the sofa and down to the golf club. Mel could do that. If there has been anyone I have seen in the past five years about whom I would say they will succeed, it would be Mel.”

Listen, too, to Lawrence Farmer, the respected coach who worked with Alison Nicholas when she won the US Open in 1987. “Jack Grout used to say that the day that Jack Nicklaus walked into his shop was the best day of his life,” Farmer said. “I feel the same about Mel. I see no end to her talent.”

Yet the talent that makes Reid the most impressive woman golfer to emerge in Britain for years is not what makes her exceptional. It is that she is the focus of an attempt by Sir Clive Woodward, the director of elite performance at the British Olympic Association, to see how good someone who is not an Olympian can become if they are given all the professional advice and financial help that is needed. No one in golf in Britain, male or female, has ever been given such extensive advice before.

In Reid's case, this means working with 13 experts, from a fitness coach to a visual awareness coach, from an expert in nutrition to another in kinetics. She talks animatedly about her leg-strength programme, her shoulder and forearm programme and her whole body programme. “Dave [Reddin, her fitness coach] says he doesn't want to get me as strong as I could possibly be,” she said. “He wants me to be as strong as I need to be for golf.”

She explains how she eats much better because of advice from Adam Carey, a nutritionist. “He says to me that if I was a Ferrari I wouldn't get the best out of it unless I put the best petrol in. He has made me understand how important nutrition is and shown me how to cook. He has taught me that I shouldn't eat a lot of starch and carbohydrates at night, that I should eat fibrous food such as broccoli.”

And she outlines how with the help she is receiving from Kenny More, an analyst, she can have every swing she makes on a given day filmed. “Kenny can download a whole 18 holes within 20 minutes of me coming off the course, so if any one of my team want to see my swing no matter where they are in the world they log in and look at it online,” she said.

As Reid copes with her squadron of advisers, who also include a mental coach, two bio-mechanical experts, a visual awareness expert, a skills expert, a kinetic specialist who tries to stop Reid from getting injured, a doctor and a profiler, her diary resembles that of soemone at the top of the business world. Vicky Cuming, her manager, recalls trying to arrange an appointment with Reid. “I was talking to her as she was practising her juggling while at the same time trying to play keepy-uppy with a football and looking over her shoulder at some cards and shouting out what colour they were. As she was doing all that she said to me, 'I've got a window between 10.15am and 10.45 next Wednesday.'”

In Reid, Woodward saw someone on whom he could bring to bear the techniques he was using with Olympic athletes. “When I started the Olympic job I thought this was an ideal opportunity to work on a non Olympian,” Woodward said. “I had this idea to make Mel a guinea pig and I thought I would throw the kitchen sink at her and show other Olympic sports what could be done. She is a role model and a champion in the making.”

It helps that Reid is physically gifted, getting good balance from her mother, who was a dancer, and a hunger for sport from her father, a good amateur runner who weighed 6st when he was 18. She was walking at eight months and captain of an all-boys' soccer team and the only girl competing in a 20-team boys' league when she was 11. “She was playing tennis at 4,” Brian Reid, her father, said. “I was hitting tennis balls at her when she was 5 and she was diving and catching them. When she played cricket she learnt how to bowl immediately. How? I don't know. She just knew.”

But others who are similarly gifted have not received expertise worth an estimated £150,000 each year from the BOA, TaylorMade and adidas in an experiment such as this. The difference with Reid is that she has the X factor and this caught the eye of those who were thinking of investing in her.

“Sometimes you see kids who have a misplaced arrogance, an overconfidence in what they are going to do,” Ben Sharpe, a member of the Great Britain and Ireland hockey squad at the Sydney Olympics and now managing director of TaylorMade, said. “You do not get that sense in Mel. She is understated when she talks about herself. She has a mature head on her.”

Farmer said that the first time he met Reid he was impressed. “What bowled me over was that she wouldn't stop asking questions. She had a burning in her eyes. I saw that after she came back from the Curtis Cup in 2006. She hates to lose,” he said.

An incessant questioning, a desire to learn, a disregard for failure - these are characteristics that Woodward loves in people. Little wonder he likes Reid. “I thought we should look at her as an elite athlete,” Woodward said. “Take away from her the financial considerations and see how she would do. Give her the best people to work with her. To do this is not a cheap exercise. In this country we are really good at producing people with real talent but that is not enough. We are not good at producing really talented people who are good enough to win. Mel is very talented. I didn't think she would get to the top unless we put something like this in place for her. You can't get gold-medal athletes without gold-medal coaches.”

Looking at this composed young woman, you find yourself worrying what would happen if the structure erected around her should come tumbling down. You are concerned, too, that others will be jealous of the money that is being spent on her and will want her to fail. But when you put this to her and hear her answer you realise she understands the risks and knows what she is doing.

“I feel I am very lucky to be given access to these people but at the end of the day we are doing the hard work together,” Reid said. “That gives me confidence. It does not put me under pressure. I pay attention to what I am doing. I set high standards for myself. I want to win a tournament by having the lowest round each day. I want to get into the Women's British Open, to play in the Evian, to get into the Solheim Cup for next year.

“I am going to the US Tour school later this year. If you want to take yourself to the next level this is where you have to go. The girls over there are very, very good players, but I want to be better and to do that I am going to work harder than them, think more out of the box than them. I really enjoy working hard.

“I really do believe I can win the grand slam, not yet but in five years' time. It is what I dream before I go to sleep at night and it is what I think about when I wake up in the morning. I would love to be the world No 1.”

Meet the experts

Health Dr Charlotte Cowie
Fitness Dave Reddin
Nutrition Dr Adam Carey
Performance movement Joanne Elphinston
Motor skills Tag Lamche
Performance analysis Kenny More
Visual performance Dr Sherylle Calder
Performing under pressure Dave Alred
Golf swing Lawrence Farmer
Performance director Peter Mattsson
Physiology Dr Marco Cardinale
Kinesiology Dr Matt Bridge

Reid's Fairway to success

Born 19.9.87, Duffield, Derbyshire
2004, 2005 English Girls' champion.
2006 Played for Great Britain & Ireland in Curtis Cup
2007 Played for GB & Ireland in Vagliano Trophy; won Ladies British Amateur Strokeplay Championship and Scottish Strokeplay Championship; equal sixteenth in Women's British Open. Turned professional in November with a handicap of +5.
2008 Third in MFS Women's Australian Open; second in ABN Amro Ladies Open.