Juniors won't have a USGA championship to shoot for in 2020

   I have always had this theory about Serena Williams in the wake of the pulmonary embolism she endured in 2011 that forced her to confront her mortality and certainly the future of her tennis career.

   I believe arguably the greatest women’s athlete ever realized during the aftermath of her brush with death how much she loved the game of tennis, how much she loved competing at the highest level of the sport and set the stage for a second act that was, in many ways, even more dominant than the opening act.

   There was, however briefly, a period when Williams, not yet 30 at the time, had to at least consider a future without tennis. I believe it rekindled her love for the game. She went on to win 10 of her 23 Grand Slam singles titles in the next seven years, often crushing opponents much younger than she was.

   Always powerful physically, Williams was more focused, sharper mentally, never tougher than in the biggest of moments.

   The United States Golf Association announced last week that the 72^nd U.S. Girls’ Junior Championship, scheduled to be held July 13 to 18 at the Blue Course at the U.S. Air Force Academy’s Eisenhower Golf Club in Colorado Springs, Colo., and the 73^rd U.S. Junior Amateur Championship, scheduled to be held July 20 to 25 at the Hazeltine Golf Club and the Chaska Town Course in Chaska, Minn., would not be contested in 2020, just the latest casualties of the coronavirus on this year’s sports calendar.

   And the thought of all those junior golfers all around America having their most coveted championship taken away made me think of Serena Williams facing the prospect that her tennis career, at age 29, might be over.

   Winning a U.S. Girls’ Junior or a U.S. Junior Amateur is usually reserved for a girl or a guy who are headed for college stardom and a career on the LPGA or PGA tours. In many ways, it is the getting there that can be a huge moment, for some the biggest moment, of a young player’s golfing career.

   If you’re trying to maybe get a little of the cost of your college education defrayed or get bumped up an admission list, it doesn’t hurt to show up at a U.S. Girls’ Junior or a U.S. Junior Amateur.

   I followed the final foursome in the girls PIAA Class AAA Championship most of the way last fall at the Heritage Hills Golf Resort in York County. It included three freshmen, Wissahickon’s Elizabeth Beek, the eventual winner, Lower Merion’s Sydney Yermish and Unionville’s Mary Dunigan, the daughter of Golf Digest top 50 teacher John Dunigan, and a sophomore, West Chester East’s Victoria Kim.

   I suspect all four of them were thinking about how far their drives would fly in altitude in Colorado Springs this summer.

   Yermish had arrived at a U.S. Girls’ Junior a little ahead of schedule as a 12-year-old when she fired a 74 in a qualifier at Old York Country Club at Chesterfield in Chesterfield, N.J. to make it to Poppy Hills Golf Course on northern California’s Monterey Peninsula two summers ago.

   Yermish went 86-87 – shot 39 on her final nine the second day, so no quit to be found – and didn’t make match play, but she was there.

   As I mentioned, the hard part can just be getting there and Yermish didn’t earn a return trip to last summer’s U.S. Girls’ Junior at SentryWorld in Stevens Point, Wis. But I’m sure she was gearing up for a big summer and a trip to Colorado Springs was definitely part of the plan.

   Yermish was brilliant in firing 6-under-par 65 in the opening round of the District One Class AAA Championship at Raven’s Claw Golf Club last October and breezed to the district title the following day at Turtle Creek Golf Club.

   Beek came back the following week to claim the Class AAA East Regional crown at Golden Oaks Golf Club and then prevailed in a playoff with Kim, the District One champion a year earlier as a freshman, and Yermish at Heritage Hills. Dunigan finished in fifth place in her first appearance at the state championship.

   Episcopal Academy junior Lauren Jones did make it to the U.S. Girls’ Junior last summer, advancing out of a very competitive qualifier at the Steel Club.

   The Inter-Ac League girls still play in the spring, which means Jones is losing her junior high school season. She had finished second, third and second in the last three Inter-Ac Championships. This year was going to be her year.

   I’m sure all of them had their sights set on a big summer in 2020. And suddenly, it’s all being taken away.

   It is absolutely the right decision by the USGA. There is just too much uncertainty right now to try to plan qualifiers all around the country and then gather young players and their parents from all around the country to Colorado Springs in July.

   There just might not be a whole lot of chances to compete in 2020 for all of these talented youngsters. Heck, I’m already praying there will be a scholastic season for the PIAA players next fall.

   I just have this funny feeling that the vast majority of the junior players who are having their game taken away from them this year will respond the way Serena Williams did when the prospect that she might no longer be able to play her game faced her nine years ago.

   I think they will gain a new appreciation just for the opportunity to compete when that opportunity finally comes their way again.

   As much fun as the game of golf can be out with a group, be they friends or competitors, or both, on a beautiful day on a challenging course, the hard work that makes it fun can very much be accomplished on your own. I’ve seen the videos some of the Philadelphia Section PGA pros are putting up on Twitter with indoor practice tips for junior players.

   I’m sure they will all become better practicers because it looks like practice might be all they have for a while.

   That foursome from the state tournament and Episcopal Academy’s Jones are symbolic of players all over the country, right in the middle of their junior careers.

   But there are a ton of good players for whom this summer is their final season of junior golf. I feel especially bad for them.

   I think of the summer that Maryland freshman Austin Barbin of the golfing Barbins of Elkton, Md. had a year ago and I know somebody out there was poised for that kind of 2020 junior campaign.

   Barbin, the Golf Association of Philadelphia’s 2019 Junior Player of the Year, won two of GAP’s Junior majors, the Junior Boys’ Championship and the Christman Cup, captured state junior crowns in Delaware and Maryland, qualified for the U.S. Junior Amateur at the Inverness Club in Toledo, Ohio and the Boys Junior PGA Championship at Keney Park Golf Course in Windsor, Conn, where he ended up in a tie for ninth place, and finished it off with a flourish, an 11-shot victory in the American Junior Golf Association’s inaugural Imperial Headwear Junior Classic at DuPont Country Club near Wilmington, Del.

   It has been a frustrating time for all of us, none more than our young athletes who are seeing their hopes and dreams vanish because of a virus that seemed to come out of nowhere. But I take hope that all of them, especially the golfers, will use the time away from the game to fuel their desire to get better, to never take for granted any opportunity to get out and compete ever again.

   As much as this blog focuses on the young players, I try not to miss any opportunity to marvel at the 50-plus set. And they, too, are losing their national championships to the coronavirus this summer.

   Earlier this ill-fated spring, the USGA cancelled the 41^st U.S. Senior Open, scheduled to be played June 25 to 28 at Newport Country Club in Newport, R.I., and just the third edition of the U.S. Senior Women’s Open, scheduled to be played July 9 to 12 at Brooklawn Country Club in Fairfield, Conn.

   Those who might have teed it up in those events have the perspective of a long life to help them process this whole thing, although I’m not sure any of us were prepared for this.

   Senior golfers are always wondering how many more years they will have to compete at a high level. And don’t kid yourself, you have to be playing a high level to make one of these fields. It’s even tougher for the women for just the third installment of an event that was long overdue to be lost to the coronavirus.

   It is going to be, in so many ways, a lost year, this 2020. When we reclaim our lives, I suspect we will do so with a passion we didn’t realize we had.

A 2021 U.S. Curtis Cup team might look a lot different than a 2020 U.S. team would have

   The postponements and cancellations have been coming fast and furious in the three weeks – is that really all it’s been, it seems like three years – since the world changed with the realization that social distancing was going to be big part of our lives for a while.

   It looks like the fall is going to be one big golf event after another. There’s talk of a November Masters. And the U.S. Women’s Open will be contested a couple of weeks before Christmas at Houston’s Champions Golf Club.

   Maybe the Curtis Cup Match, the biennial battle between top female amateur players from the United States and Great Britain & Ireland, isn’t high on your list of big golf events, but it is on mine. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’re aware that it tilts pretty heavily toward amateur golf and as I mentioned in one of my recent posts, I’ve gotten hooked on the college scene.

   But I’ve been particularly drawn to the two Cups contested between teams chosen by the USGA’s International Team Selection Committee and the Royal & Ancient, the Walker Cup for men and the Curtis Cup for women.

   As a golf fan, I was always at least casually interested in the Walker Cup, in particular. Maybe it was all those years the pride of Lower Merion High School, Wake Forest and Aronimink Golf Club, Jay Sigel, was a player and a captain and quite memorably the playing captain in a 13-11 U.S. victory in 1985 at the best golf course in the world, Pine Valley Golf Club in the South Jersey pine barrens, over a GB&I team that featured a young Colin Montgomerie.

   My fascination with the Walker Cup was really solidified in 2009 when it was staged at my favorite golf course in the world, the historic East Course at Merion Golf Club in the Ardmore section of Haverford Township.

   As the golf writer for the Delaware County Daily Times, I was able to cover Rickie Fowler and the boys putting a pretty forceful beatdown on a GB&I team that included Tommy Fleetwood, 16.5-9.5.

   Fowler didn’t really have to be there. His could just as easily have launched his pro career earlier that summer after helping Oklahoma State earn its second straight runnerup finish in the NCAA Championship.

   I was always under the impression that Fowler delayed the start of his pro career because the U.S. Walker Cup captain, the pride of Haverford High, the University of Maryland and yes, Merion Golf Club, George “Buddy” Marucci asked him to.

   Fowler was on the team two years earlier, the first of the two consecutive teams captained by Marucci. The 2007 U.S. team pulled out a dramatic 12.5-11.5 victory at Royal County Down.

   Fowler made the commitment to his captain, whom he knew was returning to captain the U.S. team on his home course, that Fowler would be there. Probably didn’t hurt that even a casual glance at the history of golf in this country reveals how many great moments have happened on the Hugh Wilson classic. Jones, Hogan, Nicklaus, Trevino. It goes on and on.

   Maybe it was the captain, maybe it was the golf course, maybe it was the fact that two of his Oklahoma State teammates, Peter Uihlein and Morgan Hoffman, were also on the team. But Fowler was there.

   I’ve gotten in the habit of keeping tabs once a year on some of those 2009 Walker Cuppers in this blog. It was a good group. The sum of its parts might have been better than all the individual pieces. It was a team and it was really a fun couple of days following them around on a golf course I had grown up looping on.

   When it was decided that my journalism career should come to an end in 2016, I took the blog I had started as a supplement to my coverage in the Daily Times and quite literally ran with it.

   As I quickly latched on to the college scene, I slowly came to the realization that some of the biggest names in women’s college golf would not be on a really young U.S. team, but on a very talented GB&I team for the 2016 Curtis Cup Match, which was being staged at Dun Laoghaire Golf Club in suburban Dublin.

   The GB&I team included England’s Bronte Law, fresh off an Annika Award-winning season at UCLA, and Charlotte Thomas, who had just led the Washington Huskies to a surprising victory in the NCAA Championship, and Leona Maguire, an Irish home girl who was in the middle of one of the greatest careers in college history at Duke.

   The U.S. kids did a pretty good job of keeping the final score to just 11.8-9-8.5 in favor of GB&I in front of, by all reports, a raucous gathering of golf-mad Irish fans.

   One of those U.S. kids was Mariel Galdiano, who had just graduated high school in Pearl City, Hawaii and was headed to UCLA to begin her college career.

   A couple of months later I set out to follow Jackie Rogowicz, the pride of Pennsbury High and Penn State, in the second round of qualifying for the U.S. Women’s Amateur at Rolling Green Golf Club, the William Flynn gem in Springfield, Delaware County, all of about six miles from Merion.

   Galdiano was Rogowicz’s playing partner that day and fired a brilliant 6-under-par 65 to overtake precocious 13-year-old Lucy Li for medalist honors in qualifying.

   I got a chance to briefly chat with Galdiano after that round about her Curtis Cup experience. It was obvious that she had been forced to grow up a lot as a golfer, physically, mentally and emotionally, that weekend at Dun Laoghaire.

   When a list of 12 players who would join captain Sarah Ingram, a three-time U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur Championship winner (1991, ’93 and ’94) and a three-time U.S. Curtis Cup team member (1992, ’94 and ’96), for a practice session at Loblolly in Hobe Sound, Fla. in December for the 2020 Curtis Cup Match, I mentioned that it was a tough commitment to make for the four college seniors on the list, Galdiano among them.

   Galdiano had been chosen to represent her country in the 2018 Curtis Cup Match at Quaker Ridge Golf Club in Scarsdale, N.Y. The tables were turned this time as a supremely talented U.S. team whipped a young GB&I squad, 17-3.

   Playing in a Curtis Cup Match as a senior means delaying the start of your pro career. But even after two Curtis Cup appearances, Galdiano wanted another shot at GB&I on its home turf at the Conwy Golf Club in Caernarvonshire, Wales. Clearly, the Curtis Cup experience means a lot of Galdiano.

   Galdiano was not a lock to make the eight-woman team, although you’d think her experience would have made her a valuable addition to Ingram’s side.

   Of course, would haves and could haves are prevalent in a lot of sports discussions these days.

   The 2020 Curtis Cup Match has been postponed until 2021, still at Conwy. But it seems unlikely that Galdiano and the three other college seniors who were under consideration for the team, Southern California’s Allisen Corpuz of Honolulu, Hawaii, Louisville’s Lauren Hartlage of Elizabethtown, Ky. and Furman’s Natalie Srinivasan of Spartanburg, S.C., can put their golf futures on hold for another year.

   The top three Americans in the World Amateur Golf Ranking as of Wednesday were going to be automatic qualifiers for the team. When the college season was suddenly halted three weeks ago, Srinivasan had risen to No. 14 in the Women’s WAGR and had overtaken Texas junior Kaitlyn Papp, a home girl from Austin Texas, for the third automatic spot. Papp is No 15 in the Women’s WAGR.

   Wake Forest junior Emilia Migliaccio of Cary, N.C. and No. 5 in the Women’s WAGR and Stanford recruit Rose Zhang of Irvine, Calif. and No. 8 in the Women’s WAGR would have been the other two automatic qualifiers. Migliaccio and the Demon Deacons, who lost in the NCAA Championship’s Final Match to Atlantic Coast Conference rival Duke a year ago, were ranked No. 1 by Golfstat when the 2019-2020 college golf season came to a sudden end.

   I don’t have any inside information on the future plans of the seniors, whom the NCAA will allow an extra year of eligibility after their final springs fell victim to a global pandemic of all things, although I’m sure professional golf is certainly one of their options.

   By the time the Curtis Cup is contested next year, Migliaccio and Papp might be professional golfers. The timing can be tricky, but their talent is undeniable.

   It might not be as tough a decision for some of the younger players who were invited to participate in December’s practice session at Loblolly to include a trip to Wales on their 2021 dance card.

   Duke sophomore Gina Kim of Chapel Hill, N.C., who contended for a long time before settling for low-amateur honors in last spring’s U.S. Women’s Open at the Country Club of Charleston, Vanderbilt sophomore Auston Kim of St. Augustine, Fla. and Ohio State sophomore Aneka Seumanutafa of Emmitsburg, Md. may get called to another practice session by Ingram somewhere in December.

   Wouldn’t be shocked if the two junior standouts who joined the group at Loblolly late last year, Zhang of Irvine, Calif. and Lake Worth, Fla. phenom Alexa Pano might be hoping to still be in the mix for the postponed Curtis Cup Match.

   Zhang teamed with Migliaccio, Stewart Hagestad, winner of the 2016 U.S. Mid-Amateur Championship at Stonewall, and Brandon Wu, who led Stanford to a national championship a year ago, to give the United States a gold medal in the mixed-team event in last summer’s Pan-American Games in Lima, Peru.

   Pano finished fourth in qualifying for match play in last summer’s U.S. Women’s Amateur Championship at the Old Waverly Golf Club in West Point, Miss. days before turning 15. She displayed her match-play chops by capturing the title in the Iona D. Jones/Doherty Women’s Amateur Championship, a match-play event on South Florida’s unofficial Orange Blossom Tour, for the third time in four years in January.

   Hopefully mid-amateur standout Lauren Greenlief of Ashburn, Va., winner of the 2015 U.S. Mid-Amateur Championship, will get another chance to impress Ingram when a practice session is convened for the 2021 U.S. Curtis Cup team.

   “It is certainly disappointing any time you have to postpone something you are so actively looking forward to, but when we take our team to the Match, we want to be able to focus on competition and camaraderie, rather than have to worry about health and safety,” Ingram told the USGA website last week. “I feel for the players who have worked so hard these last two years and share in the disappointment they surely feel that the Curtis Cup will not be contested this June. Despite the delay, we will be ready and eager to have the experience of a lifetime.”

   I haven’t paid real close attention to the team GB&I was putting together for the Curtis Cup at Conwy, but I’m guessing England’s Annabell Fuller was going to be in the mix.

   Fuller was one of several teen stars who took their lumps in 2018 in the Curtis Cup at Quaker Ridge. She had been honing her game while attending the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla. the last couple of winters.

   Fuller popped up on the Florida roster in January and made an immediate impact for the Gators. She finished in a tie for third in the individual standings and helped the hosts capture the team crown in the Florida Gators Invitational not long before the coronavirus shut things down. It will be interesting to see if she remains an amateur long enough to tee it up in the postponed Curtis Cup Match in 2021.

   It’s going to be a fascinating spring/early summer on the amateur scene in 2021. The Walker Cup, which has been played mostly in the late summer in recent years, will be contested May 8 and 9 in 2021 at one of America’s iconic courses, Seminole Golf Club, a Donald Ross masterpiece in Juno Beach, Fla., home course of captain Nathaniel Crosby, the 1981 U.S. Amateur champion and son of the late, great Bing Crosby.

   Crosby’s U.S. team rallied for a 15.5-10.5 victory to retain the Walker Cup last summer at Royal Liverpool Golf Club in Hoylake, England. Crosby played on the winning U.S. Walker Cup team in 1983 at Royal Liverpool.

   Much like Marucci more than a decade ago, Crosby will get a chance to be the U.S. captain on his home course. Not sure why the May dates were chosen as the Walker Cup will be staged in the midst of college golf’s postseason. I think it’s the week between a lot of the major conference championships and the NCAA regionals and most of the college coaches I’ve seen address the issue feel that representing the Stars & Stripes in a Walker Cup Match is an experience of a golf lifetime. So, they’ll make it work.

   Too much golf? Given a choice between too much golf and no golf, a situation we are currently saddled with, I’ll choose too much golf every time.

   Finally, my Curtis Cup antenna have been especially up ever since it was announced in May of 2017 that the 2022 Curtis Cup Match will be staged at the aforementioned East Course at Merion Golf Club, the first time the old gal on the Main Line will play host to the event since 19 and 54.

   I’ve been on the record as hoping that Pano remains an amateur long enough to tee it up for the United States. Pretty sure she turns 18 later that summer. But she’s so good, the lure of the professional game might be tough to ignore.

   So here’s hoping Pano is part of the U.S. team next year in Wales and enjoys the experience so much, she’d be willing to delay the start of her professional career a little longer to wear the Red, White & Blue one more time as an amateur in 2022 at a place where golf history just oozes out of the Kentucky Bluegrass.