It was the 89th playing of the Ione D. Jones/Doherty Women’s Amateur Championship last week in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the 67th straight year the event was played at Coral Ridge Country Club, a Robert Trent Jones original.
Robert Trent Jones designed the golf course and when he decided to take ownership of the property, he added his wife Ione’s name to the Doherty Championship, one of the original events on the Orange Blossom Tour of women’s amateur events in South Florida. The Ione D. Jones portion of the competition was devoted to the senior competitors, although the event has come to be known as the Ione D. Jones/Doherty Championship.
One of the Jones’ sons, Rees, lovingly restored Coral Ridge in 2020.
You get the picture. Like most great golf events, the Jones/Doherty oozes history and tradition and is played on a golf course that is the pride and joy of one of the first families of golf course design in this country.
For the last decade, a child of the South Florida golf scene, Alexa Pano, has written a couple of chapters of her own into the rich history of the Jones/Doherty. Pano of Lake Worth, Fla. first played in the Jones/Doherty as a 9-year-old, won the thing as a 12-year-old in 2017 and won it again in 2019 and 2020.
Pano is 17 now and she would be a professional golfer, but the LPGA won’t let her. I guess the golf scene is littered with horror stories of the kid phenom who never quite delivers on the promise he or she shows at a young age, but Pano is a golfer, pure and simple.
By this time next year, I would not be shocked if Pano was gearing up for her rookie season on the LPGA Tour. Someday, you’ll be watching the Solheim Cup and one of the commentators will be saying, “Where did this kid learn how to compete like this in match play?”
Those who watched or competed against Pano in the Jones/Doherty, a match-play event, will have one of those talk-to-the-TV moments and nod knowingly while saying, “I know where.”
So, this was Pano’s farewell to the Jones/Doherty and she went out in style, even in defeat. Pano was the medalist in Monday’s qualifying with a sparkling 5-under-par 67 and reached the final before suffering a 2-up defeat at the hands of 16-year-old Brooke Oberparleiter in Friday’s title match.
I chronicled Oberparleiter’s first American Junior Golf Association (AJGA) victory last summer as she defeated Sydney Yermish, the Lower Merion junior who went on to sweep to victories in the Central League, the District One Class AAA and PIAA Class AAA Championships in the fall, in a playoff in the Imperial Headwear Junior Classic at DuPont Country Club near Wilmington, Del.
The Imperial Headwear has become the local AJGA stop in the Philadelphia area, so I always try to give it a good run in my blog because so many of the local junior players compete in it.
I followed a lot of the coverage of the Jones/Doherty last week by Steve Walters of the Palm Beach Post. The paper touted the final as a meeting of Palm Beach County locals in Pano and Oberparleiter, although Walters did report that Oberparleiter of Jupiter, Fla. also spends time in the summer in Blackwood, N.J.
Made me wonder if Oberparleiter had ever shown up in any of my posts on the Philadelphia Section PGA Junior Tour. Sure enough, there she was with a couple of top-10 finishes among the nine-holers, a coed division for 12-and-under players, in 2016, competing against Yermish, among others.
By the way, Pano first showed up on my radar in the summer of 2016 when, at age 12, she earned her first career AJGA win in what was then the local stop on the AJGA schedule, the PDQ / Philadelphia Runner Junior at Saucon Valley Country Club’s Weyhill Course.
I figured out then that Pano’s birthday was in August because she was still 11 when she teed it up in the U.S. Women’s Amateur a month earlier at Rolling Green Golf Club in Springfield, Delaware County. Pano failed to advance to match play in one of her first real big-girl events at Rolling Green, but the arc of her golf career has almost always pointed upward ever since.
Oberparleiter knew what she was up against in Friday’s final and she was up to the challenge. She ripped off three straight birdies at the fourth, fifth and sixth holes, for wins at four and six with the birdie at five giving her a half, as she turned a 1-down deficit into a 1-up advantage.
A bogey by Oberparleiter at the seventh hole enabled Pano to even the match, but the long-hitting Oberparleiter restored her 1-up edge with a birdie at the ninth. A birdie at the 14th hole gave Oberparleiter a 2-up lead with four holes to play.
Oberparleiter’s par putt at the 16th hole lipped out, enabling Pano to creep within 1-down. The pair halved the 17th hole with pars and Oberparleiter carried her 1-up advantage to the last hole.
Pano’s approach from 90 yards away at the 18th hole left her 20 feet short of the hole on the front edge of the green. Oberparleiter lifted her 58-degree wedge shot from 75 yards away to nine feet from the cup. Pano knew her birdie try wasn’t going to fall the moment she struck it and she walked right to Oberparleiter and conceded her birdie putt and the match.
“That was definitely one of the best rounds I’ve ever played in my life and that’s what I needed today, so it came at the right time, that’s for sure,” Oberparleiter told Walters of the Palm Beach Post. “I’m so honored to have even gone to the finals and to win the event is huge for me.”
Oberparleiter reached the final with an impressive 4 and 3 victory in Thursday’s semifinals over another Jones/Doherty stalwart, Meghan Stasi, South Jersey raised, but a longtime resident of the Fort Lauderdale area.
Stasi was Meghan Bolger when she won the Women’s Golf Association of Philadelphia’s Match Play Championship seven straight times from 1999 to 2005. It was while competing in the Jones/Doherty that she first met her future husband Danny Stasi while she was in the midst of her run of four U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur crowns between 2006 and 2012.
Danny Stasi, owner of the Shuck ’N Dive Cajun Café, a Fort Lauderdale institution, proposed to his future wife on the Swilcan Bridge on the 18th hole at St. Andrews while she was competing for the United States in the Curtis Cup Match. You can’t make this stuff up.
Stasi owns two Jones/Doherty wins in 2012 and again in 2018 when she beat a 14-year-old Pano in the final. Oberparleiter ripped off wins at the ninth, 10th and 12th holes to turn a 1-up edge into a commanding 4-up advantage to turn back the veteran Stasi and advance to the final.
Pano had a tough fight on her hands in her semifinal match against Boston College’s Canice Screene, a sophomore from England.
Pano had a 2-up lead after winning the 14th hole, but her tee shot on the par-3 16th hole found the water and Screene sent the match to the 18th hole, still with a shot at 1-down. Screene left her approach just short at the 18th hole and, rightly thinking she needed to hole her chip shot, sent the ball well past the hole. With Pano safely on in two, the match was over when Screene missed her part putt, giving Pano a 2-up victory.
Pano was joined in her threesome in qualifying by the best Penn women’s golfer who never played for the Quakers. That would be Elle Nachmann of Boca Raton, Fla., who nearly matched Pano, carding a solid 3-under 68 in qualifying to earn runnerup honors in stroke play.
Nachmann shook the golf world last summer when she stunned Rose Zhang of Irvine, Calif., the No. 1 player in the Women’s World Amateur Golf Ranking (WAGR), 1-up, in the opening round of the U.S. Women’s Amateur Championship at Westchester Country Club in Rye, N.Y. I don’t think Zhang has lost since, maybe a half in a Curtis Cup four-ball match, but that’s about it.
Nachmann had planned to join the Penn program in the fall of 2020 as a freshman, but the coronavirus pandemic prompted the Ivy League to never let its golfers compete for the entirety of the 2020-2021 season.
The combination of her epic victory over Zhang and the realization that the Ivies don’t really take sports all that seriously left Nachmann with little choice but not to return to Penn, at least not for golf.
It was Nachmann whom Oberparleiter ran into in Wednesday’s quarterfinals and it was there that Oberparleiter’s run to the title really started to gain some steam as she cruised to a 3 and 2 victory. Pano reached the semifinals with a 3 and 2 victory over Canadian junior standout Peyton Costabile.
Stasi wasn’t the only WGAP Match Play champion in the final eight at Coral Ridge as Samantha Perrotta, the 2020 winner at Old York Road Country Club, gave Screene all she wanted before Screene advanced with a win on the 20th hole.
Perrotta is a tremendous story as golf has become a valuable tool in her lifelong struggle with autism. The better she gets at golf, the less autism holds back Perrotta on the golf course and everywhere else.
Stasi reached the semifinals with a hard-fought 1-up victory over Tennessee’s Kayla Holden, a sophomore from Coral Springs, Fla. Holden had posted a solid 3-under 69 to finish third in the qualifying for match play.
Holden reached the quarterfinals with a 3 and 2 victory in the opening round of match play over the ageless Liz Haines of Merion Golf Club. I can’t believe that Haines has never won the WGAP Match Play Championship, but I don’t have access to the whole history of the event at this point. I’m thinking she must have been crowned the Philly Women’s Amateur champion at least once in her illustrious career.
I do know that Haines fell in the final of the 2004 U.S. Senior Women’s Amateur and that, at age 70, she earned a trip to the 2018 U.S. Senior Women’s Am at Orchid Beach Golf & Beach Club in Vero Beach, Fla.
Not sure why Haines chooses to play in the Amateur division of the Jones/Doherty, although the Senior division – which I’m getting to eventually – was arguably more competitive, at least top to bottom, than the Amateur division was. Haines carded a 91 to finish 14th in qualifying and earn a spot in the 16-player match-play bracket.
It’s worth noting, too, that the two finalists, like Nachmann, saw their fledgling golf careers affected by the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
Before winning the 2020 Jones/Doherty, Pano had been among the 12 players invited to a practice session for candidates for the U.S. Curtis Cup team held at Loblolly in Hobe Sound, Fla. in December of 2019.
Of course, the Curtis Cup Match, scheduled for June of 2020 at Conwy Golf Club in Caernarvonshire, Wales, became the Curtis Cup Match held in August of 2021. Her competitive opportunities limited by the pandemic, Pano was never really considered for the team for the rescheduled Curtis Cup Match.
Walters of the Palm Beach Post reported Pano plans to compete as an amateur in some Symetra Tour events and will remain an amateur long enough to tee it up in the Augusta Women’s Amateur Championship in the spring. Not sure if she has to wait until she turns 18 in August to start playing for money, but when she does, look out.
Oberparleiter saw her high school season in Florida wiped out by the pandemic and, with all the confusion in America’s schools regarding protocols, she just opted for home-schooling.
Oberparleiter should get a nice confidence boost from her Jones/Doherty victory as she heads up to Orlando for the AJGA’s Hilton Grand Vacations Annika Invitational, presented by Rolex, which tees off Sunday at the Eagle Creek Golf Club.
A couple of first-time Jones/Doherty competitors, Kim Keyer-Scott of Estero, Fla. and Susan Curtin of Westwood, Mass., met for the Senior division title in Friday’s final.
The 54-year-old Keyer-Scott played 3-under par golf in claiming the title with a 4 and 3 victory. Keyer-Scott quickly built a 4-up lead in the first six holes. After winning the first hole with a par, Keyer-Scott made a birdie at the second to take a 2-up lead. She won the fourth hole and then had a tap-in for birdie at six to take control of the match with a commanding 4-up advantage.
Curtin reached the round of 16 in last summer’s U.S. Senior Women’s Amateur Championship at The Lakewood Club in Point Clear, Ala.
Like I said, the Senior division was very competitive with a 32-player match-play bracket. Keyer-Scott and Curtin had to survive two matches Thursday to reach Friday’s final.
Keyer-Scott pulled out a 2 and 1 victory over Martha Leach, the 2008 U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur champion and the sister of three-time U.S. Women’s Open champion Hollis Stacy, in the quarterfinals. Then, Keyer-Scott turned around to claim a 2-up decision over Gigi Higgins, a quarterfinalist in last summer’s U.S. Senior Women’s Amateur at The Lakewood Club, in Thursday afternoon’s semifinals.
Curtin capped a long day by getting past Terrill Samuel of Canada in the semifinals. Samuel, who lost to fellow Canadian Judith Kyrinis in the 2017 U.S. Senior Women’s Amateur at Waverley Country Club in Portland, Ore., was the Senior division’s medalist in qualifying with a 1-under 71.
Earlier Thursday, Curtin pulled out a 1-up victory over Shelly Haywood in a hard-fought quarterfinal.
Such was the quality of the 32-player match-play bracket that Corey Weworski of Carlsbad, Calif., the 2004 U.S. Women’s Mid-Am champion, was an upset victim in the opening round, but battled back to defeat Amy Kennedy of Naples, Fla., 1-up, in the Senior First-Flight final.
The Senior Second-Flight title went to Ivy Steinberg of Canada as she claimed a 4 and 2 victory over Carolyn Creekmore of Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. in the final. Creekmore was the 2004 U.S. Senior Women’s Amateur champion, defeating Merion’s Haines in the final at Pasatiempo Golf Club in Santa Cruz, Calif.
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