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Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Galdiano, Lee will get another Curtis Cup shot


   Mariel Galdiano had just finished firing a brilliant 6-under-par 65 in the second round of qualifying for match play in the 2016 U.S. Women’s Amateur at Rolling Green Golf Club, the William Flynn gem in Springfield, Delaware County, when I got a chance to chat her up a little bit.
   She had already answered most of the tell-us-about-your-round stuff from the USGA people who were writing for its website.
   But I had been impressed with her focus during a round that earned her medalist honors in qualifying, a round that was tied for the second-lowest ever in qualifying in a U.S. Women’s Amateur. She started making birdies and never backed off for a second, never took her foot off the gas.
   And Galdiano was only a couple of months removed from high school. She had yet to hit a shot in college golf. I wanted to know if that uncommon focus for a 17-year-old kid might have been born, at least a little, from her experience representing the United States in the Curtis Cup earlier that summer, a 11.5-8.5 loss for the Stars and Stripes to a very talented Great Britain & Ireland side in front of a rabid bunch of Irish golf fans at Dun Laoghaire Golf Club in suburban Dublin.
   “When you’re in that situation with cameras on you and a big crowd cheering for GB&I, I had to learn to focus on myself,” Galdiano said, the memory still clearly fresh in her mind.
   I also sensed that Galdiano wouldn’t mind another shot at winning a Curtis Cup for the U.S., maybe on a little friendlier home turf.
   The UCLA sophomore, a native of Pearl City, Hawaii, will get that shot. The USGA announced Tuesday that Galdiano is among the eight players who will represent the United States when the 2018 Curtis Cup Match is played June 8 to 10 at Quaker Ridge Golf Club in Scarsdale, N.Y.
   It is a college all-star team with the exception of 15-year-old phenom Lucy Li of Redwood Shores, Calif. And it is an exceptionally talented and experienced group, even if 22-year-old Sophia Schubert, a senior at Texas and the reigning U.S. Women’s Amateur champion, is the oldest player.
   And maybe the most valuable experience comes from Galdiano and her Pac-12 rival at Stanford, sophomore Andrea Lee, a 19-year-old from Hermosa Beach, Calif. Lee is the only other holdover from the 2016 team and I’m sure both she and Galdiano will let their teammates know that the Curtis Cup brings its own special kind of intensity, yes even a level higher than a U.S. Women’s Amateur match or even that of an NCAA Championship match.
   They are all among the top 21 players in the Women’s World Amateur Golf Ranking (WAGR). Galdiano, at 21, is the lowest ranked among the eight. Her UCLA teammate, 20-year-old Lilia Vu, is the No. 1 player in the Women’s WAGR. UCLA is No. 1 in the latest Golfstat rankings.
   No. 2 Alabama, like UCLA, will be represented by two players, one of whom, like Schubert, is a U.S. Women’s Amateur champion.
   That would be Kristen Gillman, a sophomore from Austin, Texas who was just 16 when she won the U.S. Women’s Amateur at Nassau Country Club on Long Island. I wasn’t following the scene as closely when the 2016 team was chosen, but in retrospect is has seemed odd that Gillman wasn’t on the team.
   But Gillman, still only 20 and No. 12 in the Women’s WAGR, was an obvious choice this time around. As I mentioned in a post on Alabama’s victory in the Liz Murphey Collegiate Classic last weekend, Gillman never seems to play a bad round. She is always right around par, thus a maddening a match-play player.
   The qualifications of Gillman’s teammate, 20-year-old Lauren Stephenson, a junior from Lexington, S.C. and No. 7 in the Women’s WAGR, were on display in one epic U.S. Women’s Amateur match last summer.
   Even in defeat, Stephenson showed talent, poise, guts, sportsmanship, you name it, in a quarterfinal loss at San Diego Country Club to Chia Yen Wu, a 13-year-old from Chinese Taipei that went 30 holes, the longest scheduled 18-hole match in the whole history of USGA match play and that’s a lot of history.
   Schubert of Oak Ridge, Tenn. would defeat Wu in the semifinals before claiming the U.S. Women’s Amateur title with a 6 and 5 victory over Switzerland’s Albane Valenzuela, Lee’s teammate at Stanford, in the scheduled 36-hole final.
   Schubert, No. 20 in the Women’s WAGR, is the leader of young Texas team that is ranked No. 7 by Golfstat.
   The U.S. team will get leadership from Schubert and from Galdiano. And they will certainly get leadership from the 19-year-old Lee, whose Stanford Cardinal are No. 4 in the country.
   After also experiencing the Curtis Cup cauldron in 2016, Lee, like Galdiano a recent high school graduate, had herself a summer. Only problem was she kept running into Eun Jeong Seong, the super-talented South Korean teen.
   Seong knocked off Lee in the final of the U.S. Girls’ Junior Championship at Ridgewood Country Club in Paramus, N.J. A couple of weeks later in the U.S. Women’s Amateur at Rolling Green, Lee, the only American to reach the quarterfinals, fell, 2-up, to Seong, the eventual champion.
   Seong was bigger and stronger than Lee and hit it farther. But Lee never backed down for one second. Lee’s only disadvantage at that point was that Seong knew all too well not to underestimate Lee.
   Lee was the best freshman in the country last year, leading Stanford to the semifinals in the NCAA Championship, falling short of a trip to the Final Match with a gut-wrenching loss to eventual champion Arizona State in the semifinals.
   Wake Forest junior Jennifer Kupcho, a 20-year-old from Westminster, Colo., has been one of the best players in Division I women’s golf for three years. Kupcho was marching toward an NCAA individual crown at Rich Harvest Farms last spring when an ill-timed gust of wind knocked down her approach at the par-5 17th into a pond fronting the green.
   Kupcho finished in a tie for second. She has played this season like a woman on a mission.
   Which brings me to Li. She showed up at Rolling Green as a 13-year-old and laid waste to a very tough golf course with rounds of 67 and 68 in qualifying. Only Galdiano’s spectacular second round prevented Li from winning medalist honors.
   She qualified for match play last summer at San Diego Country Club and was knocking UCLA players out of the bracket, including Galdiano, until Vu finally stopped her in the quarterfinals.
   Li made seven birdies on the back nine on the PGA National Resort & Spa’s Champion Course in the AJGA’s Rolex Tournament of Champions over the Thanksgiving weekend last fall. She shot 29 on the back nine in a round of 10-under 62.
   You’d think a girl as young as Li might be threatened by the spotlight on an event like the Curtis Cup. Uh-uh. The bigger the stage the better for this young lady.
   And, make no mistake about it, this will be a big stage. English woman Bronte Law was coming off a season at UCLA after which she was named the Annika Award winner. She went 5-0 in Great Britain & Ireland’s victory over the U.S. at Dun Laoghaire.The only other player to accomplish that feat is American Stacy Lewis.
   It appears Duke senior Leona Maguire of Ireland, No. 2 in the Women’s WAGR and a two-time Annika Award winner, will make this Curtis Cup her amateur swan song. Her presence alone will make GB&I a formidable opponent.
   I’m not sure why the USGA went with such a young team two years ago. A road Curtis Cup Match might have made for a tough turnaround for some of the top college players. Or maybe Galdiano and Lee and the other youngsters were just the best players.
   This time the Curtis Cup will be contested here and many of the top college players will likely be only a couple of weeks removed from some pressure-cooker matches in the NCAA Championship at Karsten Creek Golf Club in Stillwater, Okla. Their games will be fine-tuned.
   Virginia Derby Grimes will captain the U.S. team. The 1998 U.S. Mid-Amateur champion played on winning U.S. sides in the Curtis Cup Match in 1998, 2000 and 2006.
   “It’s exciting to have the team announced and to start preparing for June,” Derby Grimes told the USGA website Tuesday. “I’ve had the opportunity to get to know many of these young women over the past few months and I can tell you first-hand that they are not only remarkable players, but remarkable people who take representing the United States extremely seriously.
   “We’re going to work hard over the next few weeks and give the GB&I team all we’ve got.”
   I, for one, like your chances, captain.






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