With 158 days until the 42nd Curtis Cup Match tees off at Merion Golf Club’s East Course, the U.S. team is starting to take shape …
The Stanford women’s golf team was unable to compete in the fall of 2020 when the Pac-12 decided, in the face of a still raging coronavirus pandemic, to suspend all sports.
Finally allowed back on the golf course in the second half of the wraparound 2020-2021 season, the Cardinal, particularly standout freshman Rachel Heck, started gaining momentum as the postseason approached.
Heck, playing on her home course, the Stanford Golf Course, finished two shots clear of a tremendously talented field to capture the Pac-12 individual crown, although the Cardinal settled for a runnerup finish in the team standings, five shots behind another perennial conference power, Southern California.
But Stanford, and Heck, were just getting started.
Again playing at home at the Stanford Golf Course, the host Cardinal rampaged to a 30-shot victory over Atlantic Coast Conference power Wake Forest to claim the team crown in the NCAA’s Stanford Regional. Heck edged teammate Angelina Ye by a shot to take the individual crown.
It was off to the NCAA Championship at Grayhawk Golf Club in Scottsdale, Ariz., where the roll by Heck and Stanford during the four rounds of qualifying for match play continued unabated.
Heck of Memphis, Tenn. built a five-shot lead through three rounds at Grayhawk and, although she struggled a little in a final round of 2-over 74, she still claimed the NCAA individual crown by a shot over Pac-12 rival Emma Spitz of UCLA.
In the team chase, Stanford, behind Heck, was the only team to finish under par with a 10-under 1,142 total, 12 shots clear of runnerup Duke, another ACC power and winner of the last NCAA Championship contested in 2019.
Stanford’s relative youth might have finally caught up with it when Pac-12 rival Arizona edged the Cardinal, 3-2, in the opening round of match play at Grayhawk to end their postseason run a little short of the ultimate goal.
Heck and talented sophomore Brooke Seay of San Diego won their matches, but a stunning 30-foot birdie bomb on the 19th hole by Arizona’s Gile Bite Starkute beat Ye. Hey, match play can be that way sometimes.
To a talented core, Stanford head coach – or if you prefer her official title, the Margot and Mitch Milias director of women’s golf – Anne Walker added the No. 1 player in the Women’s World Amateur Golf Ranking (WAGR) in Rose Zhang of Irvine, Calif.
Through a fluke of pandemic scheduling, U.S. Curtis Cup captain Sarah LaBrun Ingram got a chance to give the college golf world a preview of what life was going to be like going up against Zhang and Heck when the 2020 Curtis Cup Match against Great Britain & Ireland at the Conwy Golf Club in Caernarvonshire, Wales was rescheduled for August of 2021.
Ingram couldn’t resist the urge to pair the No. 1 player in the Women’s WAGR, Zhang, with No. 2 Heck – she’s fallen back to No. 3 in the latest rankings – in a couple of the early team matches. They salvaged a half a point in a Day 1 four-ball match and won a foursomes match on Day 2 when the U.S. started to dig its way out of the 4.5-1.5 hole it found itself in following Day 1.
Zhang and Heck each claimed victories as the U.S. dominated the Saturday singles on Day 3, helping the Stars & Stripes rally to claim a deceptive 12.5-7.5 victory. Zhang went 4-0-1 and Heck, like Zhang, playing in every session, finished with a 2-2-1 mark.
Stanford was as good as you thought it might be during the fall portion of the 2021-’22 season. Zhang was the individual champion and the Cardinal swept to the team crown in each of its first three tournaments.
With Zhang and Heck off representing the United States in The Spirit International, Stanford, behind Seay, still claimed its fourth team title of the fall in the Nanea Pac-12 Preview.
At The Spirit, a unique event pairing college standouts by country rather than team at Whispering Pines Golf Club in Trinity, Texas, the U.S. team of, who else, Zhang and Heck, claimed the victory with Zhang also finishing atop the individual leaderboard. That gave Zhang four wins in the four fall tournaments she entered. Is that any good?
When it came time for the USGA’s International Team Selection Working Group to start thinking about candidates for this summer’s Curtis Cup Match at my favorite golf course, Merion Golf Club’s historic East Course, you couldn’t blame them if they took a long, hard look at the Stanford women’s golf team.
Last week, the USGA announced that Zhang, Heck and Seay – or three-fifths of the regular starting five for Stanford -- will be part of a group of a dozen women who will gather Jan. 15 and 16 at Mountain Lake in Lake Wales, Fla. for a preliminary practice session for the 42nd Curtis Cup Match which will tee off June 10th at Merion’s East Course, the iconic Hugh Wilson design located in the Ardmore section of Haverford Township in Delaware County.
Zhang and U.S. Women’s Amateur champion Jensen Castle, a junior at Kentucky from West Columbia, S.C., are automatic selections for the U.S. team. Ingram, a three-time U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur champion and a three-time U.S. Curtis Cup team member, will reprise her role as U.S. captain. Zhang makes the team by winning the Mark H. McCormack Medal, which goes to the player who spends the most time atop the Women’s WAGR.
The U.S. Women’s Amateur champion is always an automatic selection to the U.S. Curtis Cup team, but the peculiar timing of last year’s rescheduled Curtis Cup Match gave Castle a two-fer, making her immediately eligible for last summer’s U.S. team in Wales as well as this spring’s Curtis Cup Match at Merion.
There is no guarantee that the eight-women team that represents the U.S. at Merion will come from the group that gathers at Mountain Lake, but they clearly are on the USGA committee’s radar.
In addition to Zhang, Heck and Castle, two other members of the U.S. team that rallied for the victory last summer in Wales will be part of the group at Mountain Lake, Wake Forest teammates Emilia Migliaccio of Cary, N.C. and Rachel Kuehn of Asheville, N.C.
Well, right now they are not teammates. Migliaccio, who announced last year that she is going to remain an amateur for the foreseeable future, is taking a year off from college and is serving an internship with The Golf Channel. She will return to Winston-Salem for the 2022-’23 season, taking the extra year of eligibility granted by the NCAA for the spring of 2020 lost to the pandemic.
My younger brother in Florida forwarded me a really nice story Migliaccio, in her role at The Golf Channel, did on one of my favorite players, Brynn Walker, the two-time PIAA Class AAA champion at Radnor who starred collegiately at North Carolina. It was dated Dec. 10, so you can probably still find it floating around on TGC’s website.
The story chronicles Walker’s transition from the college game to professional golf. It is a difficult journey that, for Walker, has included more downs than ups at this point. But look for Walker to keep battling on the Symetra Tour in 2022. If you’re a fan of Walker, I would highly recommend Migliaccio’s piece coming from the perspective of somebody who has competed at the highest levels of amateur golf.
It was a little bit of a disappointing spring for Migliaccio, Kuehn and the Demon Deacons. The runnerup to Stanford as the top seed in the Stanford Regional, Wake Forest never got it going in the NCAA Championship at Grayhawk, finishing five shots out of the top eight teams that qualified for the match-play bracket.
Migliaccio and Keuhn, like most of the U.S. team, struggled a little on Day 1 of last summer’s Curtis Cup Match, including a loss when paired together. But Ingram didn’t lose faith in them, pairing them together again in a foursomes victory in the afternoon of Day 2.
And both won their singles matches, Kuehn’s 2-up victory over Louise Duncan, winner of The Women’s Amateur Championship last summer, providing the clinching point for Team USA. The win by the U.S., its first on the other side of the pond since 2008, gave it a 30-8-3 lead in the series.
All of the 12 players who have accepted invitations to Mountain Lake are inside the Women’s WAGR’s top 100. As I mentioned, Zhang remains No. 1 and Heck has slipped all the way back to No. 3. The Women’s WAGR seems to be a key metric used by the USGA committee in picking the U.S. Curtis Cup team.
Migliaccio is No. 10, but with her absence from the college golf scene this spring, she might not have enough competitive opportunities to maintain that lofty ranking. But the committee will likely place a high priority on the experience gained by Migliaccio, Kuehn, who is No. 16 in the Women’s WAGR, and Heck last summer in Wales when it comes down to making its final calls.
Castle is the lowest-ranked player among the Mountain Lake dozen at No. 94 in the Women’s WAGR, but she is already assured her spot on the U.S. team.
Castle displayed incredible tenacity in her run to the U.S. Women’s Amateur title last summer at Westchester Country Club in Rye, N.Y., including a gritty victory over her old junior rival Heck on the 19th hole in the semifinals.
Castle again proved the moment isn’t too big for her with a solid performance for the U.S. team in Wales. Ingram batted Castle leadoff in the Saturday singles and she battled teen phenom Hannah Darling of Scotland to a draw.
Seay is underrated in the Women’s WAGR at No. 80, but she is a match-play veteran. In addition to her match-play victory in Stanford’s quarterfinal loss to Arizona in the NCAA Championship, Seay reached the quarterfinals of the U.S. Women’s Amateur last summer at Westchester.
The two oldest players invited to Mountain Lake are a couple of 22-year-olds, Julia Johnson of St. Gabriel, La. and No. 11 in the Women’s WAGR, one of the emotional leaders of the Mississippi team that captured the national championship at Grayhawk last spring, and Baylor’s Gurleen Kaur of Houston and No. 79 in the Women’s WAGR. Pretty sure both are fifth-year players on their respective college teams.
Rounding out the group that will be auditioning for the U.S. Curtis Cup team are Duke’s Erica Shepherd, a junior from Greenwood, Ind. and No. 37 in the Women’s WAGR, Georgia’s Jenny Bae, a senior from Suwanee, Ga. and No. 69 in the Women’s WAGR, Ohio State’s Aneka Seumanutafa, a senior from Emmitsburg, Md. and No. 60 in the Women’s WAGR, and teen phenom Megha Ganne of Holmdel, N.J. and No. 22 in the Women’s WAGR.
Bae was the individual champion in the NCAA’s Columbus Regional last spring, leading the Bulldogs to the team crown.
“The amateur talent in the United States is so incredibly strong right now and it’s an honor to gather with this group for a practice session,” Ingram told the USGA website. “We have a great mix of young women, including many players who helped lead us to victory in Wales just a few months ago and some players who have played fantastic golf this fall on the collegiate level who I am excited to get to know.
“I’m very much looking forward to our time together and I know the players are as well.”
Zhang has a pair of USGA titles on her resume as she captured the U.S. Women’s Amateur in 2020 at Woodmont Country Club in Rockville, Md. and made a triumphant return to Maryland by capturing the U.S. Girls’ Junior Championship at Columbia Country Club in Chevy Chase last summer.
Shepherd also owns a pair of USGA crowns, winning the U.S. Girls’ Junior in 2017 at Boone Valley Golf Club in Augusta, Mo. and joining forces with Duke teammate Megan Furtney to claim the U.S. Women’s Amateur Four-Ball Championship in 2019 at Timuquana Country Club in Jacksonville, Fla.
Shepherd helped Duke reach the semifinals of the NCAA Championship at Grayhawk last spring, the Blue Devils falling to Oklahoma State one step short of the Final Match.
Ganne made her first big splash when she reached the semifinals of the 2019 U.S. Women’s Amateur at Old Waverly Golf Club in West Point, Miss. as a 15-year-old. Last spring, she was the darling of the U.S. Women’s Open at The Olympic Club in San Francisco, playing in the final group in the final round. She struggled a little in the final round, but earned low-amateur honors by finishing in a tie for 14th place.
Ganne was part of the U.S. contingent for last summer’s Curtis Cup Match in Wales as the second alternate. And where does she plan to play college golf beginning at the end of the summer? Well, Stanford, of course.
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