Texas head coach Ryan Murphy will have a young and talented
bunch of Longhorns when the 2017-2018 season begins in a few weeks. He’ll also have a U.S. Women’s Amateur
champion to lead them.
With Murphy on the bag Sunday, Texas senior Sophia Schubert
of Oak Ridge, Tenn. put on a flawless display of match-play golf at San Diego
Country Club in Chula Vista, Calif. to claim a 6 and 5 victory in the scheduled
36-hole final with Stanford sophomore Albane Valenzuela to become the third
Longhorn to be crowned U.S. Women’s Amateur champion.
The 21-year-old Schubert became the first collegian and the
first woman over the age of 20 to capture the U.S. Women’s Amateur since Duke’s
Amanda Blumenherst, then 21, did it in 2008.
And let’s not kid ourselves here. With all the sniping
American women hear about the dominance of foreign players – really overdone,
in this humble blogger’s opinion – it was nice to see an American hoist the
iconic Robert Cox Trophy.
The fact that Schubert’s surgical performance came at the expense
of Valenzuela, born in New York City, but raised in Switzerland, makes it even
more impressive. Valenzuela is No. 3 in the Women’s World Amateur Golf Ranking
for a reason, but on this day she was no match for Schubert.
“It definitely gives me a lot of confidence,” Schubert told
the USGA website. “I’ve always wanted to go pro, but this really did it for me.
Now I’m going to remain an amateur just to play in these events that I’m exempt
in and I think that’ll be an incredible experience for me.
“I would like to play in the Curtis Cup, yes, and I hope
this helps.”
Schubert basically pitched a perfect game in taking a 4-up
lead in the morning round. She didn’t lose a hole, not one. She grabbed the
lead with a birdie at the first hole and never trailed, only the fourth woman
to capture the title without ever being behind, joining Becky Lucidi (2002),
Morgan Pressel (2005) and former world No. 1 Lydia Ko (2012).
Schubert won the fifth with a birdie, the 10th
with a birdie and the 11th with a par in building her 4-up lead.
Valenzuela gave herself a ton of birdie opportunities, but
those putts get a little tougher when your opponent makes it quite clear that
you’re going to have to make birdie to win a hole. That’s how you apply
pressure in match play.
Valenzuela birdied the first hole of the afternoon round to
cut her deficit to 3-down. But Schubert won the 22nd hole with a par
to restore her 4-up advantage. And when she drained a 25-footer from the fringe
on the 29th hole, her lead was 5-up with seven holes to go. A par on
the 31st hole finished the job.
Schubert became the first Texas player to win the U.S.
Women’s Amateur champion since Kelli Kuehne won the second of her back-to-back
championships in 1996. Another Longhorn great, Michiko Hattori, won the 1985 U.S.
Women’s Amateur, the only Japanese player to win it.
Schubert was the glue on a Texas team that claimed the Big
12 championship last spring and advanced out of the Lubbock Regional to qualify
for the NCAA Championship at Rich Harvest Farms in Sugar Grove, Ill.
Many of the players from that team return and Murphy has a bang-up
recruiting class, led by Agathe Laisne of France and Kaitlyn Papp of Austin,
Texas.
Laisne came from seven shots back to surge past Valenzuela
in the European Ladies’ Amateur Championship earlier this summer. Laisne
reached the second round of match play in Chula Vista before falling to fellow
French woman Shannon Aubert, Valenzuela’s Stanford teammate and the qualifying
medalist at San Diego Country Club.
Papp teamed up with fellow Texas teen Hailee Cooper, who
will join the Longhorns a year from now, to capture the 2016 U.S. Women’s
Amateur Four-Ball Championship at the Streamsong Resort in Florida.
It is difficult to measure the value of having a senior like
Schubert, a U.S. Women’s Amateur champion, around to lead them.
And Virginia Derby Grimes, the U.S. captain for the 2018
Curtis Cup Match, might indeed be very interested in having Schubert on the
American side at Quaker Ridge Golf Club in Scarsdale, N.Y.
Monica Vaughn, who won the NCAA individual crown last spring
as a senior at Arizona State, was the oldest player on a U.S. team that fell to
Great Britain & Ireland in the spring of 2016 at Dun Laoghaire Golf Club
outside Dublin.
That was a pretty strong GB&I side with the likes of
Leona Maguire and Bronte Law, who has since turned pro, on it. But the U.S.
will be on home soil this time and won’t want to see a repeat of the 2016
outcome.
Vaughn probably wasn’t entirely comfortable being the leader
of the team while she still had a year of college to go. She proved to be a
tremendous leader by helping the Sun Devils win the NCAA team title at Rich
Harvest Farms, but that was almost a year after her Curtis Cup experience.
Schubert, with a year to process the fact that, yes, that’s
her name on that cool trophy with the names of all those great players on it,
might be the perfect pick to lead the U.S. side at Quaker Ridge.
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