Zhang delivers the clincher as Stanford defeats Oregon in Final Match at Grayhawk to claim NCAA title

    Stanford had been since so good in the beginning of the wraparound 2021-2022 season, winning every tournament it teed it up in the fall portion of the campaign as Rose Zhang, then as now the No. 1 player in the Women’s World Amateur Golf Ranking (WAGR), joined a team that had earned the top seed in the match-play bracket at the NCAA Championship the previous spring.

   As good as the Cardinal had been then, even winning once with Zhang and last year’s NCAA individual champion, Rachel Heck, off preparing to represent the United States in The Spirit International, they were winning 54-hole stroke-play events.

   What would happen, though, when it came to match play? The pre-Zhang team had fallen in the quarterfinals after dominating 72 holes of stroke play in the NCAA Championship a year ago at the Grayhawk Golf Club’s Raptor Course in Scottsdale, Ariz.

   The answer came Wednesday at Grayhawk when Zhang, a freshman from Irvine, Calif., finished off a stubborn Sofie Kebsgaard Nielsen, a junior at Oregon from Denmark, 3 and 1, to give Stanford a 3-2 victory over the Ducks in the NCAA Championship’s Final Match.

   Turned out, Stanford just might be even better at match play than it was in the more traditional stroke-play format.

   Stanford had won its first NCAA crown in 2015, the first year that the match-play layer was added to the NCAA Championship. Players and coaches were wary of this new format. They knew that match play was quirky, maybe even, dare we say, unfair. Like they were playing some kind of fair game to begin with.

   Nobody knew it better than Anne Walker, the Margot and Mitch Milias director of women’s golf at Stanford. She watched some really talented Cardinal teams during the Andrea Lee-Albane Valenzuela era come up excruciatingly short a couple of different times in match play in the NCAA Championship.

   But maybe because match play challenges you mentally as much, if not more, than it does physically, maybe, just maybe, this Stanford team was better equipped to handle match play than some of its predecessors.

   Brooke Seay, a junior from San Diego and No. 42 in the Women’s WAGR, and Aline Krauter, a senior from Germany and No. 26 in the Women’s WAGR, jumped on their Oregon opponents early and never took their feet off the gas as they put two Stanford points on the board early Wednesday while each completing a 3-0 run through the match-play bracket at Grayhawk.

   As I mentioned in my post following Tuesday’s quarterfinal-semifinal day at Grayhawk, Seay literally cut her teeth in the match-play bracket at the U.S. Girls’ Junior Championship year after year. Krauter navigated the match-play bracket to capture The Women’s Amateur Championship during the coronavirus pandemic-plagued summer of 2020.

   Both reached the round of 16 in last summer’s U.S. Women’s Amateur Championship at Westchester Country Club in Rye, N.Y.

   In Wednesday’s Final Match, Seay took out Oregon’s Ching-Tzu Chen, a junior from Taiwan, with a 4 and 3 decision. Krauter claimed a 5 and 3 victory over Hsin-Yu (Cynthia) Lu, a sophomore from Taiwan and No. 27 in the Women’s WAGR.

   Lu was the impressive winner of the Pac-12’s individual title last month on the Ducks’ home course at Eugene Country Club

   Sadie Englemann, a sophomore from Austin, Texas, and Heck, a sophomore from Memphis, Tenn. and No. 4 in the Women’s WAGR, also had early leads in their matches Wednesday, but, to the surprise of nobody who watched Oregon join the elite of women’s college golf this spring, the Ducks battled back.

   Briana Chacon, a junior from Whittier, Calif. and No. 67 in the Women’s WAGR, turned things around to deliver a point for Oregon with a 1-up victory over Englemann.

   Tze-Han (Heather) Lin, Oregon’s senior leader from Taiwan and No. 98 in the Women’s WAGR, rallied to earn another point for the Ducks with a 3 and 2 victory over Heck.

   Caught the part of The Golf Channel’s broadcast when it was mentioned that Heck has been battling mononucleosis ever since the Augusta National Women’s Amateur in early April, which explains some of her absences from the lineup this spring.

   But you only need to watch Heck interact with her teammates for a few minutes to see what a leadership role she has for Stanford. And her 2-up victory over Georgia’s Jenny Bae in the quarterfinals, when some of her teammates were struggling a little against the determined Bulldogs, was as big a match win as any achieved by a Stanford player in three rounds of matches.

   So, it was left to Zhang in the Final Match to bring the national championship home.

   You want to talk about match-play experience, Zhang’s got plenty of it. She ran the table to win the U.S. Women’s Amateur in 2020 at Woodmont Country Club in Rockville, Md. and again to claim the U.S. Girls’ Junior Championship last summer at Columbia Country Club in Chevy Chase, Md.

   Zhang and Heck were part of a United States victory over Great Britain and Ireland in last summer’s Curtis Cup Match at the Conwy Golf Club in Caernarvonshire, Wales. Not sure if anything builds match-play scar tissue better than playing in a match on foreign soil when it feels like a whole country is rooting against you.

   And Zhang got the job done. Kabsgaard Nielsen battled back from a big early deficit because that’s what Oregon players have been doing all spring on their way to making the Ducks the legitimate No. 2 team in the country.

   But Zhang had the answers, particularly when she spun her approach off the slope on the par-4 15^th hole to five feet and converted the birdie putt to turn a narrow 1-up advantage into a 2-up lead with three holes to play.

   Stanford had its hands full in both of its matches Tuesday against Southeastern Conference foes Georgia and Auburn. Getting challenged and surviving might have made the Cardinal even tougher in the Final Match.

   For Walker, though, it was just a matter of character, something, she felt, is why this Stanford team was the last one standing Wednesday at Grayhawk.

   “It takes really special people to (win with expectations), to be able to shut that noise out and be able to come out here and perform and allow yourself to swing free the way they did today,” Walker told the Stanford website. “It speaks to the caliber of player they are, and it also speaks to the type of person they are.

   “And we saw that with Rose being the individual, when you’re fighting for an individual title, it’s much harder. But when you’re fighting for a team title, you’re just powered by something so huge and so deep, that, for some reason, you’re able to put that aside.”

   If you’re in the Philadelphia area, you’ll get a chance to watch Zhang and Heck wearing the Red, White & Blue and competing for the United States in a couple of weeks in the 42^nd Curtis Cup Match at one of America’s truly great golf courses, the historic East Course at Merion in the Ardmore section of Haverford Township.

   And if Heck isn’t sufficiently recovered from her bout with mono, U.S. captain Sarah Ingram has a pretty good alternate in Brooke Seay.

   Oh yeah, another member of the U.S. team at Merion is Megha Ganne, the teen standout from Holmdel, N.J. Ganne will start her college career later this summer at … wait for it … Stanford, so yeah, look out for the Cardinal again, same time next spring.