It was always going to be a special year, 2022, because I knew I was going to get a chance to see some of the best amateur women golfers in the world, many of whom I’ll be watching on TV playing on the LPGA Tour for years to come, teeing it up in the Curtis Cup Match at my favorite golf course in the world, the historic East Course at Merion Golf Club in the Ardmore section of Haverford Township.
The experience exceeded my expectations.
If you’ve read any of my posts about Merion, you know I grew up in the neighborhood four blocks below the eighth tee on the East Course, that I looped there for 12 seasons, mostly in the 1970s, that I was a forecaddie on hole No. 6 in the 1971 U.S. Open and brown-nosed my way into the playoff between Jack Nicklaus and Lee Trevino – I had the even holes – and looped for Jay Cudd, assistant pro at Scioto Country Club, in the 1981 U.S. Open.
Through all the great experiences I had at Merion over the years, though, the 2009 Walker Cup Match when the Rickie Fowler-led U.S. team defeated Great Britain & Ireland, was right up there with my favorite Merion memories. I was able to cover that Walker Cup for the Delaware County Daily Times while in the midst of a 38-year journalism career, spent mostly covering sports of all sorts.
It’s why I so looked forward to the 42nd Curtis Cup when it was announced that the event was coming to Merion for the first time since 1954.
I had started this blog when I was still working at the Daily Times. When the inevitable layoff notice came in 2015, I figured I might as well keep the blog going. In following some of the Delco kids I had covered when they were in high school, I got hooked on things like college golf and totally underrated and under-covered amateur events like the Walker Cup and the Curtis Cup.
I was vaguely aware of the college golf scene when the Walker Cup came to Merion in 2009, but I had been closely following the college scene in the years leading up to the 2022 Curtis Cup. I was very much aware just how talented all the young women who were coming to Merion were.
The U.S. team was filled with current college standouts, but the Great Britain & Ireland side was largely comprised of top college players as well.
If you wanted to bring in 16 young ladies who were outstanding players, but who could also be ambassadors of the game, role models for the young boys and girls who flocked to Merion to watch them play, the committees that selected these two teams succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
As impressed as I was by the high level of play that I saw at Merion, it was the way the women behaved when they weren’t in the lineup for a session that is my most vivid memory of the Curtis Cup.
Megha Ganne, the Jersey girl who was either about to or just had graduated from high school, was signing autographs and asking her young fans, “Do you play golf?”
Ganne’s future Stanford teammate, Rachel Heck, used her session off to hand out glitter like they were going to stop making the stuff. At least half the kids following the matches had an American flag in glitter on one or both of their cheeks.
And then there was the golf.
U.S. team captain Sarah Ingram fearlessly teamed her two youngest, least experienced players, Ganne and Amari Avery, in a four-ball match in Friday morning’s first session because she knew just how, well, fearless the youngsters were.
You’d think a couple of teen-agers playing on an international stage on one of the most iconic courses in golf might be a little intimidated. Not these two. Ganne and Avery rolled to a 3 and 2 decision over a really strong GB&I pair of Caley McGinty and Lauren Walsh as the U.S. won two of the first session’s three matches.
Ganne had wowed the golf world by contending in the U.S. Women’s Open a year earlier at the Olympic Club before settling for low-amateur honors. Avery of Riverside, Calif. had toyed with the idea of turning pro, but instead enrolled at Southern California and was one of the hottest players in college golf in the second half of the wraparound 2021-2022 season.
The best stretch of pure talent I saw the whole weekend came in the second session Friday afternoon when I caught up with the Stanford pair of Rose Zhang, the No. 1 player in the Women’s World Amateur Golf Ranking (WAGR), and Heck.
Zhang had just won the individual NCAA crown while leading the Cardinal to the team title at Grayhawk Golf Club in Scottsdale, Ariz. as a freshman. Heck had won the NCAA individual crown at Grayhawk a year earlier as a freshman and was also a big part of Stanford’s run to the national championship a few weeks before arriving at Merion.
Two players of that caliber playing in an alternate-shot format would be easy, right? But think about it. Golf is the ultimate individual sport. In a foursome match, a poor shot by your partner leaves you in a precarious position completely not of your doing.
But Zhang and Heck are not just high golf IQ women, they’re high IQ people, period. And it showed. It was like watching two golfers become one.
When I caught up to their match, Zhang and Heck were 1-down to Florida State teammates Charlotte Heath and Amelia Williamson after six holes.
Zhang stuck their approach to 12 feet at the seventh hole and Heck drained the birdie putt to even the match. Heck’s approach at the short, par-4 eighth hole nearly went off the back of the tiny green, but then spun back to five feet and Zhang made the birdie putt.
Heck drilled her tee shot to an impossible pin at the par-3 ninth hole to five feet, a birdie putt Heath and Williamson ultimately conceded when they couldn’t make par. Just like that, Zhang and Heck went from 1-down to 2-up on their way to a 4 and 2 victory that capped a spectacular 5-1 day for the homestanding US of A.
GB&I battled valiantly and seemed to be on the verge of getting back into it throughout Saturday’s two sessions, but the U.S. kept getting big putts to fall when it needed them most and still took a commanding 8.5-3.5 lead into the Sunday singles.
Any of those matches would have been worth a follow, but I settled on Emilia Migliaccio, the once and future Wake Forest standout, against Annabell Fuller, a star at Florida who was playing in her third Curtis Cup Match for GB&I.
Migliaccio had once seemed to be on a fast track to the LPGA Tour. But she reassessed things in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, announcing she would remain an amateur for the foreseeable future in the days leading up to the 2021 Augusta National Women’s Amateur Championship, which she lost in a playoff.
She had taken the 2021-’22 college season off to take an internship with The Golf Channel and a few weeks before the Curtis Cup was doing post-round interviews of her U.S. Curtis Cup teammates at the NCAA Championship at Grayhawk. Migliaccio was back at Wake Forest this fall, taking the extra year of eligibility the NCAA granted to those who saw their seasons end prematurely in 2020 in those uncertain first months of the pandemic.
I was curious to see how Migliaccio was playing, but I had an ulterior motive. Fuller’s caddy at Merion was Nate Oxman, a long-time Merion looper who used to be one of my Central League contacts when he was the golf coach at Haverford High.
There’s a great shot of Oxman in a really neat feature story authored by David Shefter of the USGA on all the Merion loopers who caddied, for both teams, in the Curtis Cup. If you Google “2022 Curtis Cup Match,” you can still find that story on the USGA’s home page from the event. The Merion caddies did all of us former Merion loopers proud that week.
Migliaccio was really good that day, rolling to a 6 and 5 victory over Fuller as the U.S. swept to wins in seven of the eight singles matches. If Migliaccio remains an amateur, she just might show up on another U.S. Curtis Cup team in 2024 at Sunningdale Golf Club in Ascot, England.
The final count was U.S. 15.5, GB&I 4.5. It said a lot more about the talent on the U.S. side than any shortcomings on the GB&I team because, trust me, you’re going to be hearing from a lot of the gals on that GB&I team in the years to come.
It was old-home week for me at Merion as I ran into a couple of my old caddy buddies and even a few of my current caddy colleagues from Stonewall, where I have launched a second act to my caddy career in recent years.
The golf course, lovingly restored by Gil Hanse since the 2013 U.S. Open, was its classic self. Much like the Walker Cup in 2009, Merion was much easier to navigate during a Curtis Cup Match than it had been during that 2013 U.S. Open. To get to wander around the East Course watching all those wonderful players playing all those great shots that Merion requires for free was the biggest bargain in golf in 2022.
The Curtis Cup was one of just three big events that were staged in our area in 2022 as the U.S. Senior Open returned to Saucon Valley Country Club’s Old Course for the third time in Bethlehem a couple of weeks after the Curtis Cup and Wilmington Country Club’s South Course hosted the BMW Championship, the penultimate stop in the FedEx Cup Playoffs, in August It would be the first PGA Tour event ever held in Delaware.
I did preview stories for Joe Burkhardt’s Tri-State Golfer for both events, meeting with Mimi Griffin, who has been doing behind-the-scenes work at USGA Championships, mostly the U.S. Open, for three decades, at Saucon Valley, as well as Tom Humphrey, the chairman of Wilmington’s BMW effort, and Jon Urbanski, the director of golf courses and grounds, at Wilmington.
I had a nice chat with Pete Kowalski, who ran the press room for the USGA for the 2009 Walker Cup at Merion, at this year’s Curtis Cup. He had the highest regard for Griffin, with whom he’s worked many times over the years. Of the many people who help put on golf tournaments I’ve met over the years, she’s as sharp as they come.
They had a popular winner at Saucon Valley as Ireland’s Padraig Harrington, a three-time major champion during his younger days, showed his class by taking the U.S. Senior Open crown for his first major success as a senior.
You put on a big golf event in the Philadelphia area and the golf fans will come out in droves. It was the case in August as the people at Wilmington put on a great show with Patrick Cantlay successfully defending the BMW Championship he won at Caves Valley a year earlier with another display of precision golf at the South Course.
Had a sense that big things might be coming in 2022 for Nick Gross when the Downingtown West junior finished alone in fourth place in the 11th Junior Invitational at Sage Valley Golf Club in Graniteville, S.C. in March, a relatively recent addition to the junior circuit that keeps getting more prestigious with each passing year.
But the kid took the world of amateur golf by storm in the summer, culminating with an astounding run to the quarterfinals of the U.S. Amateur at The Ridgewood Country Club in Paramus, N.J. just before he turned 16 in August.
Gross had reached the second round of match play in the U.S. Junior Amateur at the Bandon Dunes Resort on the rugged Oregon coastline in July, a pretty nice accomplishment in its own right.
It was in wrapping up a really strong showing for Gross in the Boys Junior PGA Championship at Cog Hill Golf & Country Club in suburban Chicago, where he contended all week before finishing in third place, that I realized he had snuck in a U.S. Amateur qualifier before heading to Bandon Dunes and had earned a spot in the field at Ridgewood.
As good as Gross was in getting to the quarterfinals at Ridgewood, I’m not so sure that his very best work in 2022 came in the U.S. Amateur qualifier at Canoe Brook Country Club’s North Course in Summit, N.J., where he was the runnerup with a 7-under 137 total.
Do you have any idea how competitive a U.S. Amateur qualifier for what essentially is a home U.S. Amateur can be? I covered the U.S. Amateur qualifier at Rolling Green Golf Club and Llanerch Country Club for the 2005 U.S. Amateur at Merion. The competition was as fierce as anything I’ve ever seen.
I’m sure anybody who’s anybody in amateur golf circles in New Jersey was at Canoe Brook that day and the 15-year-old kid from Downingtown beat all of them but one.
Then Gross gets to Ridgewood and survives a 15-man playoff for the final 11 spots in the match-play bracket, then he beats Cohen Trolio of West Point, Miss., the teen phenom when he reached the semifinals of the 2019 U.S. Amateur at Pinehurst, 3 and 1, in the opening round of match play, then he beats Chris Francoeur, who starred collegiately at Rhode Island and Louisville, 3 and 2, in the second round and then he beats Luke Potter of Encinitas, Calif., who was wrapping up a stellar junior career, 4 and 3, in the round of 16 and … boom … he’s in the quarterfinals of the U.S. Amateur.
I know how good Gross is and I was surprised. I can’t imagine what the rest of the golf world was thinking.
The ride ended at the hands of Dylan Menante, who is wrapping up his college career by taking his fifth season at North Carolina after helping Pepperdine capture a national championship in 2021 at Grayhawk and reach the semifinals last spring.
Menante of Carlsbad, Calif., No. 8 in the World Amateur Ranking (WAGR) at the time, defeated Gross, 4 and 3, before taking the eventual champion, Sam Bennett, the Texas A&M standout from Madisonville, Texas, to the 18th hole and suffering a 1-up setback in the semifinals.
A couple of months later, there was Gross firing a breathtaking 8-under 64 at Turtle Creek Golf Course in the final round of the District One Class AAA Championship to beat a strong field by nine shots with a remarkable 14-under 130 total.
Gross was mostly focused on the district team competition and his 64 did lead Downingtown West to the first District One Class AAA title in program history as the Whippets finished four shots clear of Spring-Ford.
Gross might have finally hit the wall a couple of weeks later as he settled for a third-place finish in defense of his PIAA Class AAA title, the state tournament returning to Penn State for the first time in more than two decades.
By the time Gross finished in 10th place in the Rolex Tournament of Championships, the marquee event on the American Junior Golf Association (AJGA) circuit, at TPC San Antonio’s Canyons Course in late November, he had announced that he had made a verbal commitment to join the program at Southeastern Conference power Alabama in the summer of 2024.
There is a lot to look forward to in 2023 for Gross. The run to the quarterfinals at Ridgewood exempts him from local qualifying for the U.S. Open in the spring and he’s exempt from qualifying for the U.S. Junior Amateur at the Daniel Island Club in Charleston, S.C. in July and for the U.S. Amateur at Cherry Hills Country Club, the William Flynn classic in Cherry Hills Village, Colo. in August.
A couple of players from Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania suburbs did come home from Penn State with state championship medals in October.
Lower Merion senior Sydney Yermish culminated her brilliant scholastic career by repeating as the winner of the PIAA Class AAA Championship, albeit over a different golf course, the White Course at Penn State. She had won the 2021 crown at the Heritage Hills Golf Resort in York County and had lost in a playoff at Heritage Hills as a freshman in 2019.
Phoenixville freshman Kayley Roberts finished three shots behind Yermish in second place. A day later, Kayley Roberts and big sister Kate, a junior, led the way as the Phantoms captured the PIAA Class AAA team crown. I don’t think we’ve heard the last from the Roberts siblings.
A couple of weeks earlier, Yermish had won the District One Class AAA crown for a third time at Turtle Creek by three shots over a trio of players that included Kate Roberts.
Yermish heads for a Michigan program that has suddenly joined the Purdues, the Northwesterns and the Michigan States as a Big Ten power next summer with three district and two state crowns on her resume, right up there with anybody who has come out of District One in the last 20 years or so.
Devon Prep junior Nick Ciocca captured the gold medal in the PIAA Class AA Championship, winning by a shot at Penn State’s Blue Course. Ciocca, a product of the junior program at Aronimink Golf Club, teed it up in the Boys Junior PGA Championship at Cog Hill, but failed to survive the 36-hole cut.
Ciocca will join Calen Sanderson, the 2020 PIAA Class AAA champion as a senior at Holy Ghost Prep, at Notre Dame, a rising power in the extremely competitive Atlantic Coast Conference, in the summer of 2024.
The Philadelphia area had a strong group at Cog Hill as Gross and Ciocca were joined by Norristown’s Josh Ryan, who won the Golf Association of Philadelphia’s Junior Boys’ crown for a third straight summer at Bala Golf Club and was GAP’s Junior Player of the Year for a second time in three years. Like Ciocca, Ryan came up just short of making the 36-hole cut at Cog Hill.
Ryan’s college career at Division I power Liberty is off to a strong start as he had a couple of solid showings in the last two tournaments on the fall schedule of the Flames’ wraparound 2022-’23 season.
Shot of the year? That’s an easy one.
Malvern Prep freshman Davis Conaway arrived at Llanerch’s enticingly short par-4 18th hole trailing Germantown Academy junior Ajeet Bagga by a shot in the battle for the title in the Bert Linton individual Inter-Ac League Championship.
Conaway would say he had heard the 18th at Llanerch, a wonderful layout that hosted the PGA Championship in 1958, was driveable, but that it wasn’t necessarily the smart shot. But he’s 14 and he needed a birdie and it was 276 yards with a little wind behind. Out came the driver.
Even if it wasn’t a tournament that he was trying to win, it would have been a brilliant strike by Conaway. The ball never left the flag as the sun broke through for the first time on a day that had been foggy and showery up to that point. The ball cleared the front bunker and settled on the tiny green, 20 feet from the pin.
Conaway, who had helped the Friars win their first Inter-Ac League crown in seven years, calmly put the driver back in his bag, retrieved his putter and took the putter cover off. Long walk with a putter indeed.
Bagga, who had been the Inter-Ac’s best player during the league’s six invitationals that comprise the regular-season schedule, laid back with an iron and stuck his approach to 12 feet.
Conaway’s eagle try slipped five feet past the tricky pin, but Bagga’s birdie try got away from him on the low side. Conaway buried his birdie putt and when Bagga ever-so-slightly pulled his four-footer for par, Conaway was the Bert Linton winner.
I was headed for the media center next to the driving range at Merion during the Curtis Cup while a clinic for junior girls was under way, the little girls, say in the 7- to 8-year old range, whaling away with drivers.
After I had walked past, I heard a frustrated voice utter, “this is impossible.” But in 2022 I saw what is possible when a young player puts his or her mind to it on the golf course. Let’s leave it at almost impossible and just keep trying and see what 2023 has in store.
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