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Sunday, September 1, 2019

North Carolina's Walker takes first step toward earning an LPGA Tour card


   When I spoke to Brynn Walker a few months before she started her college career at North Carolina, it was obvious what the ultimate goal was for a player who had closed out her scholastic career at Radnor a few months earlier by winning her second straight PIAA Class AAA Championship and leading the Raiders to the PIAA Class AAA boys team championship.
   Walker wanted to be a professional golfer playing on the LPGA Tour. It is her stated goal in her biography on the North Carolina website. A few weeks after I talked to her, Walker got her first taste of LPGA competition when she earned a spot in the LPGA ShopRite Classic at the Seaview Hotel and Golf Club at the Jersey Shore in a Monday qualifier.
   Walker didn’t make the cut that week in June and she failed to make it to the final day again last spring when she once again teed it up in the LPGA ShopRite Classic for a second time after again advancing out of a Monday qualifier.
   Last month, Walker took a first tentative step toward realizing her goal when she put four solid rounds together and finished in a tie for 15th place in the LPGA Qualifying Tournament Stage I in Rancho Mirage, Calif.
   It is the beginning of a long, long road to earning LPGA Tour credentials or maybe some status on the Symetra Tour for 2020.
   Walker is about to embark on her senior season at North Carolina. Pretty sure she has been in the starting lineup for every tournament the Tar Heels have played in since she arrived in Chapel Hill. She has had her moments, but I’m not sure Walker is completely satisfied with her performance as a college golfer.
   At the end of Walker’s freshman year in the spring of 2017, North Carolina rallied in dramatic fashion at the Athens Regional to earn the team a trip to the NCAA Championship at Rich Harvest Farms in Sugar Grove, Ill.
   North Carolina has been awarded an NCAA regional berth the last two springs, but the Tar Heels have been unable to make it back to the NCAA Championship.
   Walker will be the veteran leader for North Carolina in her senior season and she has been consistently solid in her first three seasons.
   She won the Women’s Golf Association of Philadelphia Match Play Championship on her home course at St. Davids Golf Club.
   Walker followed that up with her best showing in her fourth trip to the U.S. Women’s Amateur. She qualified for match play for the first time at Old Waverly Golf Club in West Point, Miss. Walker then birdied the last two holes in her opening-round match to turn a 1-down deficit into a dramatic 1-up victory over three-time U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur champion Julia Potter-Bobb.
   Walker then gave eventual finalist Albane Valenzuela, a senior at Stanford and the No. 4 player in the Women’s World Amateur Golf Ranking (WAGR), all she wanted before falling, 1-up. Walker was 1-up with three holes to play before Valenzuela registered back-to-back birdies at the 16th and 17th holes.
   Walker showed up in California confident and playing some pretty good golf. She opened with a 71 at Mission Hills Country Club’s Arnold Palmer Course, struggled a little with a 74 at Shadow Ridge Golf Club, posted a solid 69 on Mission Hills’ Dinah Shore Tournament Course (the one the ANA Inspiration, the first LPGA major every year, is contested on) and finished up with a 72 on the Dinah Shore Course for a 2-under 286 total. The final round was Aug. 25.
   That earned her a spot in the LPGA Qualifying Tournament Stage II, which will be played in October at the Plantation Golf & Country Club in Venice, Fla.
   An unspecified number of players will advance out of Stage II to the new-fangled LPGA Q-Series, although it appears it’s a minimum of top-60 finishers and ties.
   The Q-Series debuted last year and it is a two-week eight-round marathon. The first four rounds will be played Oct. 23 to 26 at the Pinehurst Resort & Country Club’s No. 6 Course in Pinehurst, N.C., so not terribly far from Chapel Hill. The final four rounds will be played Oct. 30 to Nov. 2 at Pinehurst’s No. 9 Course.
   The waters are deep at the LPGA Q-Series as the survivors of LPGA Qualifying Tournament II will be joined by the players who finished between 101 and 150 on the 2019 LPGA Tour money list, the players who finished between 11 and 35 on the Symetra Tour money list and any players among the top 75 in the Rolex Women’s World Golf Ranking.
   The top 45 finishers in the LPGA Q-Series will earn playing privileges on the LPGA Tour for 2020. Any other players who survived the cut after six rounds (108 holes) and played all eight rounds at Pinehurst will have some status on the Symetra Tour for 2020.
   Walker, like some of the players who competed in the inaugural Q-Series last year, is going into this process as an amateur. And should Walker make the top 45 in the Q-Series, she will have the option of deferring acceptance of her LPGA Tour card until after the college season is completed. Or she can head directly to the LPGA Tour for the start of the 2020 season and forgo the rest of her senior season at North Carolina.
   Two players who quite famously waited until the college season was over to start their LPGA Tour careers, Wake Forest’s Jennifer Kupcho and Arkansas Maria Fassi, had their reasons for coming back for the spring portion of their senior seasons.
   Kupcho and Fassi finished 1-2, respectively, in the inaugural Augusta National Women’s Amateur Championship and gained a ton of recognition and fans in the process.
   Kupcho led the Demon Deacons to the Final Match in the NCAA Championship at The Blessings Golf Club in Fayetteville, Ark. before falling to ACC rival Duke. Fassi, playing on the course she called home for the Razorbacks, won the NCAA individual title. And both appear well on their way to making enough money to retain their LPGA Tour playing privileges for 2020 despite not joining the fray until nearly half the season was over.
   Kupcho finished second to 2019 U.S. Women’s Open winner Jeongeon Lee6 by a shot in the inaugural Q-Series while Fassi finished 32nd after a scintillating start.
   Alabama’s dynamic duo of Kristen Gillman and Lauren Stephenson decided not to return for the second half of their senior seasons after finishing tied for 13th and tied for eighth, respectively, at the LPGA Q-Series. They had led the Crimson Tide to the Final Match in the NCAA Championship at Karsten Creek Golf Club in Stillwater, Okla. in the spring of 2018 when they lost to Arizona. Not sure they had a whole lot left to prove on the college scene.
   Walker still has a long way to go before she would face that kind of decision. And there are so many different factors involved in making that call.
   The dynamic wasn’t quite the same a couple of years ago when Duke’s Leona Maguire, who had spent most of her last two college seasons at or near the top of the Women’s WAGR. There were fewer LPGA Tour cards up for grabs in the old LPGA Qualifying School Final Stage, but if an amateur earned one, she was deemed a professional and immediately forfeited the rest of her college eligibility.
   Maguire of Ireland earned some Symetra Tour status for making it through the first two stages of Q-School and chose to not even tee it up in the Final Stage. She had made the same decision a year earlier when she announced on the eve of the 2016 LPGA Qualifying School Final Stage while she was still a junior that she intended to play out her college career at Duke.
   Looks like Maguire will graduate to the LPGA Tour for 2020 by finishing among the top 10 in the Symetra Tour’s Volvik Race for the Card. Not sure anyone ever doubted that she would get there.
   Of course, if making the LPGA Tour is your dream and you get the shot a little sooner than you expected, you just might want to go for it.
   The medalist at LPGA Qualifying Tournament Stage I was Bianca Pagdanganan, who practically willed that Arizona team to the NCAA Championship two springs ago at Karsten Creek.
   Pagdanganan of the Philippines is still an amateur, but she has used up her college eligibility. She opened with a 70 at Shadow Ridge, fired a 67 at the Dinah Shore Course and a 70 at the Arnold Palmer Course before closing with a 68 at the Dinah Shore Course for a 13-under 275 total.
   Australian Hira Naveed, coming off an outstanding college career at Pepperdine, was the runnerup with a 10-under 278 as she closed with back-to-back 69s at the Dinah Shore Course in her final two rounds.
   It would have been an interesting fall for Walker as she begins her senior season in Chapel Hill. A trip to the LPGA Qualifying Tournament Stage II makes it all the more intriguing.



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