If you made it to the end of a lengthy post I did last fall wrapping up the finals of the U.S. Mid-Amateur and U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur championships, you might remember that, in my role as an occasional looper at Stonewall, I was hearing some talk that the U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur Championship might be coming to Stonewall’s North Course in 2023.
Those rumors were confirmed Wednesday when the United States Golf Association announced that the younger of Tom Doak’s twin gems where East Nantmeal Township meets Warwick Township in the northwestern corner of Chester County would indeed play host to the 2023 U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur Championship.
I wrote at the time that a U.S. Women’s Mid-Am at Stonewall North would be extremely cool. I stand by that.
I base a lot of that feeling on having caddied in and blogged about the 2016 U.S. Mid-Amateur Championship, played mostly on Stonewall’s Old Course. My guy, Michael Mitani of Irvine, Calif., didn’t make it into the match-play bracket, but the guy could flat-out play.
It was the second USGA championship I caddied in, although it had been 35 years – back in the days of wood woods – since I had carried for Scioto Country Club assistant pro Jay Cudd in the 1981 U.S. Open at Merion Golf Club’s historic East Course.
I was always aware of the mid-am championships. Our area’s Jay Sigel had won it three times in a stretch of five years from 1983 to 1987 when the U.S. Mid-Am was still in its infancy. Caddied for him once at Merion in a U.S. Amateur qualifier in the early 1970s. If you told him it was a 165-yard shot, he hit it 165 yards.
Still, it was a revelation to see the level of play in 2016 at Stonewall. I followed Merion Golf Club’s Michael McDermott, a three-time BMW Philadelphia Amateur champion, around for a couple of his matches. He made a really nice run to the quarterfinals before falling to the eventual champion Stewart Hagestad.
And I watched Hagestad rally from 4-down with five holes play against 2014 champion Scott Harvey to capture the title on the 37th hole in an epic final. I chronicled Hagestad’s second U.S. Mid-Amateur victory last fall at Sankaty Head on Nantucket Island off the Massachusetts coast, the same post in which I hinted at the possibility that a 2023 U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur might be coming to Stonewall.
An interesting part of that 2016 U.S. Mid-Am final was the fact that the scheduled 36-hole final between Hagestad and Harvey started on the North Course. The North had been used as the other course for the 36 holes of qualifying for match play, but this was the first time the USGA had ever used two courses for a 36-hole final. It has since done the same for the 2019 U.S. Amateur in which Pinehurst Nos. 4 and 2 were used for the 36-hole final between Andy Ogletree and John Augenstein.
The point being, the USGA would not have used Stonewall’s North Course for the 36-hole final of the U.S. Mid-Am if it didn’t consider the course to be of championship caliber.
I don’t think the field for the U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur is large enough to require two courses for qualifying for match play, although the adjacent Old Course would certainly be there if needed for a day.
The Old Course, which opened in 1993, is widely considered the better of the two courses. But the “Udder Course” – if you’re familiar with Stonewall’s iconic cow logo, you get the Stonewall crowd’s affectionate nickname for the North – is a really good golf course in its own right and maintained by superintendent Dan Dale and his crew just as meticulously as its adjacent big brother.
From what I’ve heard, Doak got some direction from some old-time Philly area greats, Sigel among them, in creating the Old Course’s subtle putting surfaces in the tradition of some of the Philadelphia area’s classic designs. When Doak returned 10 years later, he created putting surfaces at the North course that, in a lot of cases, have a lot more slopes and dips. Not as subtle, shall we say.
Like the Old Course, the North plays to a par of 70 with five par-3s, three par-5s and 10 par 4s. The par-5s are gettable, especially if you find the right lines, including the par-5 finishing hole that could provide for some drama should matches get there.
In the coronavirus pandemic summer of 2020, the Pennsylvania Golf Association staged its Senior Amateur Championship on the North Course. It was scheduled to be a 36-hole event, but with Hurricane Isaias expected to show up the next day, everybody was aware that there was a really good chance the championship was going to be reduced to 18 holes.
I was carrying for Gary Daniels in the Super Senior (65 and older) division. One of the guys in our group was Lee Lykens, 74 years young, from Clearfield in the western half of the state. The super seniors played, basically, the ladies tees, 5,900 yards or so. It actually hurt Daniels, who can still bomb it, because it took away any advantage his length might give him.
Lykens, though, was nearly flawless. He made an eagle at the par-5 third hole, birdied the short par-3 sixth, birdied the par-5 eighth and offset his lone bogey at the 10th with a birdie at 14. The guy shot his age and then some with a 4-under 66 and when Isaias arrived right on schedule the next day, Lykens was an easy winner of the Super Senior division.
The North is listed as 6,790 yards from the tips. I’m guessing it will play in the neighborhood of 6,300 to 6,500 yards for the best mid-am women in the world in 2023. Much like the Old Course, there are birdies to be had on the North Course, but there is danger lurking in the fescue and on the tricky greens.
Stonewall’s partners did a great job in their first shot at putting on a USGA championship with the 2016 U.S. Mid-Am. Sounds like they are looking forward to getting another chance in two summers.
“We are excited to continue our partnership with the USGA by hosting another national championship and are particularly enthused to welcome some of the finest women amateurs in the world to our club,” Stonewall president John May told the USGA website.
And, as Kim Gradisek, co-chair of Stonewall’s Championship Committee, noted, the 2023 Women’s Mid-Amateur Championship will come in the middle of a three-year run of major USGA events for women in Pennsylvania.
“With the Curtis Cup at Merion this year, the Women’s Mid-Am at Stonewall in 2023 and the U.S. Women’s Open at Lancaster in 2024, Pennsylvanians will be able to watch elite female golfers play wonderful area venues in three consecutive years,” Gradisek told the USGA website. “We are delighted to be part of that mix.”
This will be the third U.S. Women’s Mid-Am to be staged in Pennsylvania. The Kahkwa Club, a Donald Ross classic in Erie, hosted the U.S. Women’s Mid-Am in 2016, the same year the U.S. Mid-Am was at Stonewall and Allegheny Country Club in Sewickley was the host for the 1990 edition of the U.S. Women’s Mid-Am.
Western Pennsylvania legend Carol Semple Thompson, a World Golf Hall of Fame member, won the first of her two U.S. Women’s Mid-Am titles at Allegheny. Thompson owns seven career USGA wins.
Since I expanded this blog in 2016, I’ve gotten in the habit of following how the local qualifiers fare when they get to the USGA championships.
Alyssa Roland, who lives in Short Hills, N.J., but still calls Overbrook Golf Club her home course, reached the match-play bracket in last fall’s U.S. Women’s Mid-Am at the Berkeley Hall Club’s North Course in Bluffton, S.C. before falling in the opening round.
Meghan Stasi lives in the Fort Lauderdale, Fla. area these days, but she won seven straight Women’s Golf Association of Philadelphia Match Play Championships from 1999 to 2005 when she was known as Meghan Bolger and played out of Tavistock Country Club in South Jersey.
Stasi has won four U.S. Mid-Amateur crowns, the last in 2012. She also earned a spot in the match-play bracket at Berkeley Hall, but fell in the opening round. As recently as 2019 at Forest Highlands Golf Club in Flagstaff, Ariz., though, Stasi made a run to the U.S. Women’s semifinals.
Merion’s Catherine Elliott has been a regular at the U.S. Women’s Mid-Am, making her fourth appearance at Berkeley Hall. Elliott, who started scholastically at Notre Dame and collegiately at Penn, failed to make the match-play bracket at Berkeley Hall, but she did earn a spot in match play in 2019 at Forest Highlands and won a match.
I got a chance to see a whole gang of standout high school girls when I was covering the scholastic golf scene in a previous life with the Delaware County Daily Times. One of them was former Council Rock North standout Erica Herr, who won back-to-back PIAA crowns in 2011 and 2012.
Herr seemed to drop out of the competitive golf scene following a college career with Atlantic Coast Conference power Wake Forest. But there she was last summer, a mid-am “rookie” at age 25, punching her ticket to Berkeley Hall in a Golf Association of Philadelphia-administered local qualifier at Philadelphia Country Club.
Herr just missed making the match-play bracket at Berkeley Hall, but she is the kind of woman you’ll see in the U.S. Women’s Mid-Am in two summers at Stonewall. The college women’s golf scene has really blossomed in the last couple of decades.
Not all of those good players decide to play professionally. Many of them get real jobs, but they haven’t forgotten how to play. The U.S. Women’s Mid-Am is a great competitive outlet for women like Herr.
The winner at Berkeley Hall was a mid-am “rookie,” 25-year-old Blakesly Brook, a former college standout at Tennessee. She defeated Aliea Clark, who played college golf at UCLA, but was doing graduate work at New York University.
I’ll have to pay special attention to the results of this year’s U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur Championship, which tees off Sept. 17 at Fiddlesticks Country Club in Fort Myers, Fla. The winner will be defending her title at the “Udder Course” at Stonewall in 2023.
By the way, 119 days until the Curtis Cup Match between the United States and Great Britain & Ireland at Merion’s East Course. And yes, I’m counting the days.
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