U.S. sweeps the Sunday singles to complete a powerful Curtis Cup victory

   I’m not exactly sure where Virginia Derby Grimes, the captain of the 2018 U.S. Curtis Cup team, was when the stroke-play qualifying portion of last month’s NCAA Championship at Karsten Creek Golf Club in Stillwater, Okla. concluded May 21.

   Maybe she was in Stillwater, maybe not. But wherever she was, she had to like what she saw on the final medal-play scoreboard of the 2017-’18 Division I season.

   The individual winner was Wake Forest’s Jennifer Kupcho, a junior from Westminster, Colo. Got her on my team. Tied for second was Stanford’s Andrea Lee, a sophomore from Hermosa Beach, Calif. Yup, she’s on my team.

   Four of the players in the group tied for seventh at 1-under 287 were Alabama’s Lauren Stephenson, a junior from Lexington, S.C., and Kristen Gillman, a sophomore from Austin, Texas, and UCLA’s Lilia Vu, a junior from Fountain Valley, Calif., and Mariel Galdiano, a sophomore from Pearl City, Hawaii. Check, check, check and check.

   Oh yeah, and the Bruins’ Vu and Galdiano and the Crimson Tide’s Stephenson and Gillman had helped their teams finish tied for first and Lee’s Cardinal had finished fifth in the team standings.

   To that sixsome, Grimes was adding Texas’ Sophia Schubert, a senior from Oak Ridge, Tenn. who had led the Longhorns to the Big 12 title and finished tied for 21^st in the individual standings at Karsten Creek, and Lucy Li, already a star at 15 from Redwood Shores, Calif.

   It had the makings of a really powerful team and Sunday at Quaker Ridge Golf Club in Scarsdale, N.Y., the U.S. team delivered its final shot, a sweep of the eight singles matches that enabled it to reclaim the Curtis Cup from Great Britain & Ireland with a resounding 17-3 victory.

   The record-breaking margin of victory was much less an indictment of the level of play by a pretty talented bunch from GB&I than it was a testament to the talent and grit of what turned out to be a pretty remarkable group of young ladies from America. GB&I ran into a buzzsaw.

   “I’m very proud of my players,” Grimes, a member of three winning U.S. Curtis Cup teams as a player, told the USGA website. “They are a phenomenal group of girls. They’ve been so much fun to be around and they just jelled and bonded.”

   The U.S. entered the Sunday singles with a commanding 9-3 lead and needed just a point-and-a-half to wrest the Curtis Cup back from GB&I and Grimes’ two U.S. Women’s Amateur champions were the first to deliver.

   Not long after Schubert, who captured the U.S. Women’s Amateur last summer at San Diego Country Club, claimed a 2 and 1 victory over Olivia Mehaffey, a junior at Arizona State from Ireland, Gillman, winner of the 2014 U.S. Women’s Amateur at Nassau Country Club on Long Island, completed a 5 and 4 victory over Annabell Fuller, a talented 16-year-old from England.

   Vu claimed a 2-up win over Sophia Lamb, a 20-year-old from England, Kupcho earned a 2 and 1 victory over Lily May Humphreys, a really impressive 16-year-old from England, Lee outdueled Alice Hewson, a senior at Clemson from England, Stephenson claimed a 2 and 1 win over Shannon McWilliam, an 18-year-old from Scotland, Li rolled to a 5 and 4 win over India Clyburn, a senior at North Carolina State from England, and Galdiano prevailed, 1-up, over GB&I’s veteran, 24-year-old Paula Grant from Ireland.

   It wasn’t like GB&I laid down. Six of the eight matches reached at least the 17^th hole. No, this was just a matter of the U.S. team being too good.

   It was certainly reminiscent of the 19-7 shellacking the U.S. men put on GB&I in the Walker Cup Match last summer at Los Angeles Country Club.

   At the time, I posted that the decision to go to match play for the final stage of the NCAA Championship a decade ago for the men, a move followed five years later by the women, certainly has something to do with the improved match-play prowess of just about all of America’s international teams.

   Timing is everything, I guess. I mentioned when this year’s U.S. Curtis Cup team was named how it stood in contrast to the youthful contingent we sent to Dun Laoghaire Golf Club in suburban Dublin two years  ago.

   I’m not sure if that had something to do with a lot of the college players feeling that the trip across the pond was too close on the heels of the college season. The argument could also be made that the young kids who had been dominating the U.S. Women’s Amateur the previous three summers were just better than the college players.

   Lee and Galdiano had just walked in their high school graduations when they found themselves battling a very, very good GB&I team in front a raucous golf-mad Irish crowd. They probably did pretty well to lose by only three points.

   Somewhere Sunday I’m sure the teammates of Lee and Galdiano at Dun Laoghaire, Sierra Brooks, Mika Liu, a teammate of Lee’s at Stanford now, Hannah O’Sullivan, Bailey Tardy, Monica Vaughn, the hero of Arizona State’s 2017 NCAA championship team, and Beth Wu, a teammate of Vu's and Galdiano's at UCLA now, got a kick out of watching the tables turned in the favor of Team USA.

   This team was more talented, and probably more importantly, much more seasoned than that one was. And it certainly didn’t hurt that seven of them were in the cauldron of the NCAA postseason just three weeks ago.

   Gillman and Li played four rounds of the U.S. Women’s Open, played unusually early this year, on their way to Quaker Ridge. Lee and Schubert also teed it up at Shoal Creek, but missed the cut.

   But, as Grimes mentioned, they came together really nicely as a team. Many of them will be pro golfers in the near future. We know they can play golf. But the way they came together at Quaker Ridge bodes well for them in nearly anything they try.

   There’s a pretty good chance those kids from GB&I will be two years better and pretty determined to get the Curtis Cup back in GB&I’s hands when the 2020 Curtis Cup Match is played at Conwy Golf Club in Caemarvonshire, Wales.

   The next time the Curtis Cup Match convenes on U.S. soil, it will be staged at my favorite course in the whole world, Merion Golf Club’s East Course, in 2022. I looped there throughout the 1970s and you walk that course 1,000 times or so and the history of the game just sort of washes over you.

   Four years seems like a long time, but it will be here before you know it. Obviously, I’m a fan of the Curtis Cup, so hopefully I’ll be there. And hopefully some young girls were inspired by the performance of this special group of American women at Quaker Ridge and will form another great U.S. team.