It hasn’t quite been five years since the U.S. Girls’ Junior Championship was contested at Poppy Hills Golf Course on a foggy Monterey Peninsula.
For the United States Golf Association team that ran the event, it was a weather nightmare. The marine layer kept rolling in off the Pacific Ocean any time it wanted, creating all sorts of delays. So, the USGA did what it always does in situations like that: When it was clear enough to play, the players would play.
What shone through all that fog was some wonderful play from some really young kids.
A Saturday that was originally scheduled to be the 36-hole final dawned clear, but with all the delays, the U.S. Girls’ Junior had only reached the semifinals. It would be the eventual champion Yealimi Noh against Gina Kim and Lucy Li against Alexa Pano. The plan was to play the semifinals, then play the first 18 holes of the scheduled 36-hole final in the afternoon and finish the match the following day.
Noh turned 17 the following week and had announced her intention to turn pro the following year. Kim, who was headed for Duke, was the oldest member of the four semifinalists, having turned 18 earlier in the year.
Li was 15, although the people at Rolling Green Golf Club were still trying to figure out how the then 13-year-old had shot rounds of 67 and 68 on their William Flynn gem in qualifying for match play in the 2016 U.S. Women’s Amateur. Pano was 13.
Noh defeated Park, 3 and 2, in the one semifinal and Pano dropped an eight-footer for birdie on the 18th hole to claim a 1-up victory over Li.
Noh and Pano told tournament officials if the fog didn’t roll in, how about just play as long as we can go and see if we can finish the title match? So, they played.
By the time Noh of Concord, Calif. completed a 4 and 3 victory to claim the title, she had played 49 holes and Pano had played 51 holes.
All of this came to mind because Pano, a grizzled veteran at 18, came on strong in the final two rounds of the LPGA’s Q-Series at Highland Oaks Golf Course in Dothan, Ala. over the weekend to finish in a tie for 21st place and earn her LPGA Tour card for 2023.
It’s not quite a high enough finish to get Pano of Lake Worth, Fla. into every tournament, but she’ll be eligible to play a lot and she can fill in any holes in her schedule on the Epson Tour.
Noh has already banked more than $1.3 million in three seasons on the LPGA Tour and played on the U.S. team that fell to Europe in a hard-fought edition of the Solheim Cup in 2021 at The Inverness Club in Toledo, Ohio.
Li, like Noh a Cali girl from Redwood Shores, and Kim, who grew up in Chapel Hill, N.C., both earned LPGA Tour cards for 2023 by finishing in third place and eighth place, respectively, in the Epson Tour’s Ascensus Race for the Card in 2022.
Pano, who remained an amateur long enough to play in the Augusta National Women’s Amateur Championship one more time in April, came up just short of earning an LPGA Tour card on the Epson Tour as she finished just outside the top 10 in earnings at No. 13.
So, the Q-Series, eight rounds over two weeks on three courses on the Alabama portion of the Robert Trent Jones Trail, was Pano’s last shot to join the other semifinalists at Poppy Hills on the LPGA Tour in 2023.
What might have been Pano’s most pressure-filled round was the final round of Week 1 as her 1-over 73 over the Crossings Course at Magnolia Grove Golf Course in Mobile, Ala. enabled her to survive the 72-hole cut to the low 70 and ties on the number at 2-under 284.
Pano moved up the leaderboard with a 4-under 68 in the first round at the par-72 Highland Oaks layout, but struggled a little in the sixth round with a 1-under 71.
But the kid who didn’t think twice about playing 51 holes in one day in pursuit of a U.S. Girls’ Junior crown grinded out an impressive 4-under 68 in Saturday’s seventh round. It was a supremely professional round of golf as she made birdies at the second, fourth, seventh and eighth holes and rattled off 10 straight pars to complete the round.
Pano came out of the gate firing in Sunday’s final round, making birdies at the third, fifth, sixth, ninth and 10th holes to get it to 16-under. She answered her only bogey of the day at the 13th hole with a birdie at 14 for a 5-under 67 that enabled her to finish with a 16-under 558 total over eight grueling rounds with her immediate professional future on the line.
Kim had followed up her run to the U.S. Girls’ Junior semifinals at Poppy Hills by helping Duke capture the NCAA Championship at The Blessings Golf Club in Fayetteville, Ark. and earning low-amateur honors in the U.S. Women’s Open at the Country Club of Charleston in South Carolina in the spring of 2019.
It’s easy to forget that all these young kids had their budding golf careers suddenly interrupted in a big way in the spring of 2020 when the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic shut the game down for a while. It’s easy to forget how uncertain everything was during those spring lockdowns.
But all four of them, Noh, Pano, Li and Kim kept their heads down and kept playing, kept pursuing their dream to play on the LPGA Tour. And next year they’ll all be there, pretty much right on schedule.
Medalist honors in eight rounds of Q-Series went to 21-year-old South Korean Hae Run Ryu, who went 67, 66 and 68 in her last three rounds at Highland Oaks for a 29-under 545 total that was two shots clear of runnerup Bailey Tardy.
Tardy played on a really young U.S. Curtis Cup team back in 2016 following her freshman year at Georgia. She was in the top 10 in the Women’s World Amateur Golf Ranking (WAGR). That U.S. team took it on the chin from a Great Britain & Ireland team that included Ireland’s Leona Maguire playing in front of an adoring Irish crowd at Dun Laoghaire Golf Club in suburban Dublin.
It probably never occurred to Tardy back then that she wouldn’t make it to the LPGA Tour until 2023, but all those close calls, all those weeks grinding it out on the Epson Tour against a new wave of talented players year after year was perfect preparation for a weekend in December in Dothan, Ala.
After putting herself in position to earn an LPGA Tour card with 5-under 67 in Saturday’s seventh round, Tardy put an exclamation point on her Q-Series experience with a sparkling seven-birdie, no-bogey 7-under 65 in the final round.
Not only had she finally graduated to the LPGA Tour, Tardy did so with high honors, her 27-under 547 total earning her runnerup honors behind Ryu.
It was two more shots back to Valery Plata of Colombia and Michigan State and Aline Krauter of Germany and Stanford in a tie for third place, each landing on 25-under 549.
Plata was there playing in the fog at Poppy Hills in the summer of 2018, falling in the U.S. Girls’ Junior quarterfinals, 7 and 5, to Pano, the eventual runnerup. In the pandemic summer of 2020, Plata reached the semifinals of the U.S. Women’s Amateur at Woodmont Country Club in Rockville, Md. before falling, 2 and 1, to Australian Gabriela Ruffels, the eventual runnerup.
Plata had taken a fifth year at Michigan State, but had to leave the Spartans behind and turn pro to compete in Q-Series. After opening Week 2 at Highland Oaks with a 5-under 67, Plata proved she belongs in the big leagues of women’s golf by rattling off three straight 3-under 69s.
In a team filled with young talent, Krauter was a veteran presence for Stanford, going 3-0 in match play at Grayhawk Golf Club in Scottsdale, Ariz. last spring to help the Cardinal claim the NCAA crown. Probably not all that surprising since Krauter, in the pandemic summer of 2020, captured the Women’s Amateur Championship with a 1-up victory over England’s Annabell Fuller at West Lancashire.
Krauter probably did all she needed to do to earn her LPGA Tour card when she announced her presence at Highland Oaks with a breathtaking 10-birdie, no-bogey 10-under 62 in the opening round of Week 2 of Q-Series.
I had chronicled the journey of Samantha Wagner, the Easton native who starred at Florida, in a post I did at the halfway point of Q-Series as she emerged from four rounds at Magnolia Grove in a tie for sixth place and in real good shape to punch her ticket to the LPGA Tour.
Wagner was treading water for two rounds at Highland Oaks, opening with a 1-under 71 and matching par in the sixth round with a 72. I was starting to worry that I might have jinxed her.
Wagner made her first double bogey of Q-Series on the second hole of the seventh round. Then, leaning on all her experience from her years on the Epson Tour, Wagner righted the ship, going 12-under for her final 34 holes.
Wagner rebounded from that early double bogey in Saturday’s seventh round with six birdies in a solid 4-under 68, then closed with a six-birdie, no-bogey 6-under 66 as she finished in a tie for sixth place over the 144-hole test with a 23-under 551 total.
The leader at the halfway point of Q-School, former Louisville standout Lauren Hartlage of Elizabethtown, Ky., couldn’t quite keep up the pace she set at Magnolia Grove. But Hartlage’s final round of 1-over 73 enabled her to book her return to the LPGA Tour with a 20-under 554 total that left her in a tie for ninth place.
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