With the U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur Championship coming to the North Course at Stonewall -- the “Udder Course,” as it is affectionately known among the Stonewall partners, a reference to the property’s former life as a dairy farm – there was little doubt what the highlight of the year would be when it came time to take a look back at 2023.
I was really hoping to see a couple of the local gals, players I had seen excel as high school players a decade ago while covering the scholastic scene in District One in a past life at the Delaware County Daily Times, tee it up in the U.S. Women’s Mid-Am.
And I got that wish with former Pennsbury and Penn State standout Jackie Rogowicz reaching the semifinals and former Mount St. Joseph and Notre Dame standout Isabella DiLisio advancing to the round of 16.
I was able to watch and post about the matches in which both players were eliminated and both were tremendous battles that went to the 18th hole, Rogowicz falling, 1-up, to eventual runnerup Kelsey Chugg, the 2017 U.S. Women’s Mid-Am champion, and DiLisio dropping a 1-up decision to 59-year-old Judith Kyrinis, the 2017 U.S. Women’s Senior Amateur champion.
Go down the right side of this blog and click on September of 2023 and you can view the posts I was able to put together before, during and after the U.S. Women’s Mid-Am.
In the post I did a little more than a week after the U.S. Women’s Mid-Am, I mentioned how impressed I was with some of the older players. The minimum age for the U.S. Women’s Mid-Am is 25. DiLisio and Rogowicz were mid-am “rookies” in 2022 when they teed it up in the U.S. Women’s Mid-Am at Fiddlesticks Country Club’s Long Mean Course in Fort Myers, Fla.
But I came across some seriously good players on the other side of 50 during the week that the U.S. Women’s Mid-Am was at Stonewall.
When the U.S. Women’s Senior Amateur was held a couple of weeks later at Troon Country Club in Scottsdale, Ariz., half of the quarterfinalists had teed it up in the U.S. Women’s Mid-Am at Stonewall.
Two of those eight quarterfinalists, including the eventual champion, Sarah Gallagher, a 50-year-old senior “rookie,” were among the eight players involved in a playoff for the final three spots in match play in the U.S. Women’s Mid-Am at Stonewall.
I was there, on the bag for Tara Joy-Connelly of Middleborough, Mass. All of us had finished with 12-over 154 totals in 36 holes of qualifying for match play, the second round of which had concluded early Monday morning, about an hour or so before the playoff.
The most recognizable name in that playoff was that of 57-year-old Sarah Lebrun Ingram. A college standout at Duke in the days when college golf didn’t receive nearly the notoriety it does now, Ingram won three U.S. Women’s Mid-Am titles in the early 1990s.
Ingram had pretty much put the sticks away after being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis at age 30. But you know how golf is. It keeps calling. Ingram was the general chairman of the U.S. Women’s Amateur at her home course, The Golf Course of Tennessee.
Then the USGA asked her if she would be the captain of the U.S. Curtis Cup team for the 2020 renewal at Conwy Golf Club in Caernarvonshire, Wales and Ingram accepted.
You know how 2020 went. The 41st Curtis Cup, postponed by the global coronavirus pandemic, would not be held until August of 2021, the U.S. rallying from a Day 1 deficit to claim a 12.5-7.5 victory.
Ingram was again the captain 10 months later in June of 2022 when the 42nd Curtis Cup Match was staged in our backyard at the historic East Course at Merion in the Ardmore section of Haverford Township.
I can’t say that I crossed paths with Ingram in the three days I wandered around Merion, where I had looped as a kid, but her talented group showed all the tell-tale signs of good coaching, the U.S. cruising to a 15.5-4.5 victory over a very talented Great Britain & Ireland squad.
And all those talented kids, Rose Zhang, Rachel Heck, Rachel Kuehn, all of them, their enthusiasm for the game, wore off on Ingram, too. She wanted to compete again.
Ingram had returned to Merion a few weeks before the U.S. Women’s Mid-Am at Stonewall to punch her ticket to the U.S. Senior Women’s Amateur at Troon and earned medalist honors at the less daunting West Course (love the West as it was the course the Merion caddies got to play on Mondays) in a Golf Association of Philadelphia-administered qualifier.
But Ingram had also earned a spot in the event she had won three times, the U.S. Women’s Mid-Am, for the first time since 1996. And there she was, at age 57, in a playoff to make it into match play at Stonewall’s North Course.
Ingram had become pals with Rachel Kuehn’s mom, Brenda Corrie Kuehn, a pretty fair player at Wake Forest back in the day, during Ingram’s two terms as the captain of the U.S. Curtis Cup team.
Brenda Kuehn was in our group for the first practice round at the North Course. She was the kind of classy older player I had experienced back in my days looping at Merion when Dottie Porter, winner of the 1949 U.S. Women’s Amateur at Merion and a four-time U.S. Senior Women’s Amateur champion, or Helen Sigel Wilson would show up. They had to be in their 50s, but they were tremendous players and just a joy to be on the golf course with.
The weather for the first practice round that week was your basic real-feel of 100, a blazing sun, temperatures in the low 90s and awful humidity. Kuehn’s husband Eric was on the bag and the zingers they were throwing at each other made a pretty uncomfortable day a little easier to take.
Kuehn’s 11-over 153 total left her one shot clear of the playoff that her friend Ingram found herself in at 9 o’clock on a Monday morning on the tee of the 170-yard, par-3 ninth hole at the North. Apparently Ingram’s caddy didn’t get the memo about the potential for a playoff and was nowhere to be found.
Kuehn would need her husband for her first-round match later that day, but she could lend Eric to Ingram for the playoff. Ingram hit a terrible tee shot to open the playoff, down at the bottom of the hill right and short of the green. Not sure she could even see the top of the flag from down there.
Ingram hit a brilliant recovery shot to eight feet. By the time she lined up her putt, Ingram knew that she needed par to stay alive in the playoff. Eight inches off the right side of the cup, Eric Kuehn advised. Perfect read, perfect putt, spectacular up and down for par.
That’s me, the guy in the bib, on the ninth green in the photo that accompanies this blog post, honored to be in the same frame as Ingram, left, moments after she had made that clutch par putt. The image, snapped by Jeff Haynes, lived on the USGA home page for a few hours following the playoff.
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| That's the great Sarah Lebrun Ingram on the left. |
A par at the next hole, the par-4 10th, gave Ingram a spot in the match-play bracket. Her reward, an opening-round match with Courtney Dow, one of the three qualifying co-medalists. Dow, a standout at Texas A&M not that long ago, had left the rest of the field shaking their heads when she ripped off a seven-birdie, no-bogey 64 in the opening round of qualifying.
But match play is match play and Ingram’s been in plenty of high-leverage match-play situations. Didn’t she go out and hand Dow a stunning 3 and 2 upset loss.
Ingram would suffer a 1-up setback at the hands of Ireland’s Aideen Walsh in the second round of match play at Stonewall, but she clearly relished her chance to compete again.
A couple of weeks later in the U.S. Women’s Senior Am Troon, Ingram went off on the second day of match play.
In the second round of match play, Ingram was pitted against Joy-Connelly. Needless to say, I was rooting for the player I had looped for at Stonewall and Joy-Connelly, a senior “rookie” at 50, was playing well at Troon. She had finished in a tie for third place in qualifying for match play with a 6-over 150 total.
Ingram just dismantled Joy-Connelly, 8 and 6. And, as if to make Joy-Connelly not feel so bad about it, Ingram turned around that afternoon and laid a 7 and 6 beating on Jackie Foster of England.
Ingram ran out of steam the following day, falling 2 and 1 to Linda Jeffery of Prattville, Ala. in the quarterfinals. But for a couple of weeks in September, the 57-year-old two-time Curtis Cup-winning captain had proved she can still play a little.
One of the other quarterfinals that day at Troon saw Kuehn advance to the semifinals with a 3 and 2 victory over Martha Leach of Hebron, Ky.
Leach was another of the older players I got to watch at Stonewall. The sister of three-time U.S. Women’s Open champion Hollis Stacy and the 2009 U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur champion, Leach was in our group for two rounds of qualifying for match play.
Leach grumbled a lot about not being able to strike the ball with the middle of the club face, but she got it around in 11-over 153 and earned herself a spot in the match-play bracket. Believe me, we were facing some changing weather conditions, particularly on the back nine, of that second round at the North Course, but Leach just kept playing.
After watching Leach, without her best stuff, get it around the North those two days, I wasn’t surprised in the least to see her make a run in the U.S. Women’s Senior Am a couple of weeks later. And just like Ingram and Kuehn, Leach was just a classy individual.
Wasn’t surprised a little bit to see Kuehn play for the title at Troon. She would fall, 1-up, to Gallagher.
As I mentioned before, Gallagher was unable to survive the playoff to get into match play at Stonewall. Like Joy-Connelly, Gallagher was a senior “rookie” at Troon and the U.S. Women’s Senior Am had been her goal all along.
Probably the best of the swinging seniors in the U.S. Women’s Mid-Am at Stonewall was Kyrinis, a 59-year-old Canadian.
Kyrinis arrived at Stonewall in the midst of a summer heater. She won the Canadian Women’s Mid-Am title then, returning to the scene of her 2017 U.S. Women’s Senior Am title at Waverley Country Club in Portland, Ore., finished in a tie for sixth place in the U.S. Senior Women’s Open, the highest placing for an amateur in the short history of that championship.
I watched almost all of Kyrinis’ round-of-16 victory over DiLisio, Kyrinis putting on a match-play clinic in her 1-up victory.
Kyrinis, 30-plus years older than DiLisio, got a 1-up lead on the fourth hole and never let DiLisio get back to even. DiLisio was bombing her drives 50, 60 yards past Kyrinis, but the Canadian never let that bother her.
Earlier that day, Kyrinis had faced a contemporary of Rogowicz and DiLisio from the scholastic golf scene of a decade ago, maybe the best of them all in Erica Herr, a two-time PIAA champion at Council Rock North, in a second-round match. If there was such a thing as a District One girls golf Hall of Fame, Herr, Rogowicz and DiLisio would all be in it.
Kyrinis cruised to a 4 and 3 victory over Herr, who had been a collegiate standout at Wake Forest.
Kyrinis would drop a 4 and 2 decision to Gretchen Johnson of Portland, Ore. in the quarterfinals at Stonewall. A couple of weeks later in the U.S. Women’s Senior Am at Troon Kyrinis reached the round of 16 before falling, 1-up, to Nadene Gole of Australia.
Bottom line: I got a chance to watch a ton of terrific golf from women 50 and older in the U.S. Women’s Mid-Am at Stonewall’s North Course. As the movie title suggests, they are in a league of their own in so many ways.
Ultimately, though, the title at Stonewall went to 31-year-old Kimberly Dinh of Midland, Mich. A college standout at Wisconsin, Dinh rallied from 3-down with seven holes to go to pull out a 2-up victory over Chugg, a 32-year-old from Salt Lake City, Utah who was playing in her third U.S. Women’s Mid-Am final.
There are so many young women playing college golf these days, it’s not surprising to see more of them like Dinh, a researcher for Dow Chemical, continue to play amateur golf at a high level. It is the beauty of the U.S. Women’s Mid-Am that women like Dinh have a national championship to play for.
The victory in the U.S. Women’s Mid-Am at Stonewall earned Dinh a return trip to Pennsylvania for the 2024 U.S. Women’s Open at Lancaster Country Club, a William Flynn gem all of about 40 miles Stonewall in Manheim Township.
The 2015 U.S. Women’s Open at Lancaster was a smashing success. The players loved it, the USGA loved it and the golfing community from Harrisburg to Philadelphia and everywhere in between embraced it.
The U.S. Women’s Open tees off May 30 at Lancaster. It’s a great opportunity to watch the best women golfers in the world in their most important championship. These women can really play.
The highlight of the local scholastic scene in 2023, an area this blog pays a lot of attention to, was the battle for the District One Class AAA girls individual crown between Phoenixville sisters Kate Roberts, a senior, and Kayley Roberts, a sophomore, at Turtle Creek Golf Course, a place where the Roberts sisters have developed into outstanding players.
I was kind of hoping for a playoff between the sisters, but Kate Roberts ended up beating her little sister by a shot with a 2-over 145 total. Kate Roberts had carded a 1-over 72 at Raven’s Claw Golf Club a few miles up West Ridge Pike from the Turtle before adding a 1-over 73 at Turtle Creek in the second round.
Kayley Roberts had matched par in the opening round with a 71 at Raven’s Claw before finishing with a 3-over 75 at the Turtle for a 3-over 146 total.
It would have been even more compelling if the sibling rivalry had played out in the same group, but Kate Roberts finished a hole and a half in front of her younger sister.
With a glitch in the live scoring leaving everybody in the dark as to where they stood, Kayley Roberts, thinking she needed to birdie the final hole, tried to reach the green at the risk-reward par-5 18th in two, but dunked her approach in the water.
Plymouth-Whitemarsh junior Rhianna Gooneratne finished in third place in the District One Championship, but came back a week later to capture the PIAA Class AAA individual crown at Penn State’s Blue Course with a 4-under 140 total.
Kate Roberts finished in a tie for second place with North Pocono’s Gwen Powell, five shots behind Gooneratne at 1-over 145 and Kayley Roberts was another two shots behind her big sister in fourth place with a 3-over 147 total.
You’ll be able to watch Kayley Roberts on TV the Sunday of Masters week as she earned a trip to the Drive, Chip & Putt National Finals at Augusta National Golf Club by winning the Girls 14-15 division in a regional competition at Aronimink Golf Club.
Conestoga beat Central League rival Radnor by six shots to claim the District One Class AAA girls team crown and finished in third place behind PIAA Class AAA team champion Peters Township and runnerup Manheim Township at Penn State.
The Roberts sisters and Gooneratne are just the latest success stories to come out of the Philadelphia Section PGA Junior Tour. I routinely post the results of the Philly Junior Tour on this blog and it’s really fun to watch the kids who tee it up as youngsters blossom into high school champions.
The scholastic boys scene was missing something in 2023 as Downingtown West senior Nick Gross, the PIAA Class AAA champion in 2021 and a two-time District One Class AAA winner, was forced to skip the high school season because he was representing the United States in the Junior Ryder Cup in the suburbs of Rome.
I’ll get back to Gross, but it turned out to be dominant year for the Ches-Mont League that Gross had competed in for three years. Do I think Gross’ presence in the Ches-Mont elevated the play of the rest of the league? I do, yes I do.
West Chester Rustin junior Sam Feeney captured the District One Class AAA individual title by three shots with a solid 1-under 143 total for two tours around Turtle Creek.
And Ches-Mont League power Unionville prevailed in a playoff with Spring-Ford to claim the District One Class AAA team crown after both teams finished with 12-over 300 totals.
Western Pennsylvania dominated the proceedings at the state tournament with Butler senior Hunter Swidzinski capturing the PIAA Class AAA individual crown in a playoff with Nick Turowski of Penn Trafford and Wes Lorish of Plum after all three finished with a 7-under 137 total at Penn State’s Blue Course.
Peters Township completed a sweep for its boys and girls programs of the Class AAA crowns, finishing two shots ahead of perennial Catholic League power La Salle with District One champion Unionville another eight shots behind the Explorers in third place.
The biggest local story for the boys at Penn State was Nick Ciocca capping his brilliant scholastic career by leading Devon Prep to its second PIAA Class AA team crown in three years.
Ciocca, a product of the junior program at Aronimink Golf Club, was an individual state champion in Class AA as a junior in 2022 at Penn State. Ciocca will join the program at Notre Dame, which competes in the ultra-competitive Atlantic Coast Conference, at the end of next summer.
Were it not for the presence of Gross in the area, another product of the junior program at Aronimink, Episcopal Academy senior Hunter Stetson, would have been the best junior player in the Philadelphia area in 2023.
Stetson played in the two major junior national championships in the summer. He failed to make the cut in the Boys Junior PGA Championship at Hot Springs Country Club in Hot Springs, Ark.
But a couple of weeks earlier, Stetson made the most of his opportunity to tee it up in the U.S. Junior Amateur at the Daniel Island Club in Charleston, S.C.
Stetson earned a spot in the match-play bracket at Daniel Island and won a couple of matches before suffering a 3 and 1 setback at the hands of Zeqian Feng of China in the round of 16 on Daniel Island’s Ralston Course.
In the fall, Stetson, who will join the program at ACC power North Carolina State at the end of next summer, was the runaway winner of the Inter-Ac League’s Champion Golfer of the Year award that goes to the player with the highest point total in the league’s six invitationals that comprise its regular season.
Stetson finished in a tie for third place in the Bert Linton Invitational, the Inter-Ac’s individual championship, on a spectacular late October day on his home course at Aronimink, betrayed by a balky putter on his way to a 5-over 75.
A fellow Aronimink member, Haverford School junior Gregor Weissenberger, captured the Bert Linton with a 2-over 72.
Weissenberger had helped a balanced Haverford School team claim the first Inter-Ac title for the Fords since 2019 in a tight battle Stetson and the Churchmen and Malvern Prep.
Made it out to the Inter-Ac League girls individual championship at French Creek Golf Club for the first time in a few years in May and caught Baldwin’s Megan Aldelman cap an outstanding scholastic career by winning her second straight title with a 1-over 36 over the front nine of the Gil Hanse design in the far northwest corner of Chester County.
Notre Dame eighth-grader Kiersten Bodge was the runnerup to Adelman for the second year in a row with a 2-over 37. Her scholastic career still has a long way to go.
Episcopal Academy continued its recent domination of the Inter-Ac on the girls side, the Churchwomen claiming their fourth title in five years.
Then there was Nick Gross. By reaching the quarterfinals of the 2022 U.S. Amateur at Ridgewood Country Club in Paramus, N.J. a couple of weeks before his 16th birthday, the Downingtown West senior set himself up for a busy 2023.
For 32 holes on “Golf’s Longest Day,” it looked like Gross might be headed for Los Angeles Country Club and the U.S. Open as he had it at 5-under in the 36-hole test at Canoe Brook Country Club’s North and South courses.
Gross struggled on those final five holes and finished at even-par for the day, but for a long, long time that day, visions of a kid from Downingtown teeing it up in the U.S. Open seemed very possible.
By Gross’ standards, the rest of the summer was probably a bit of a disappointment. He missed out on making the match-play bracket in the U.S. Junior Amateur at Daniel Island, three shots out of the playoff for the final berths in match play.
After finishing in a tie for eighth place in the Boys Junior PGA Championship in Hot Springs, Ark. and teeing it up against many of the top college players in a couple of Elite Amateur Series events, Gross got it going in qualifying for match play in the U.S. Amateur in Cherry Hills Village, Colo.
After matching par in the opening round of qualifying with a 71 at Cherry Hills Country Club, a William Flynn gem, Gross fired a sparkling 5-under 67 at the other qualifying site at the Colorado Golf Club to finish in a tie for eighth place.
Gross then fell, 2-up, in the opening round of match play to another 16-year-old, Bowen Mauss of Draper, Utah.
There will be another busy summer of golf in 2024 for Gross before he joins the program at Southeastern Conference power Alabama. Have a funny feeling what’s happened up to this point is merely prelude in the golf journey of Nick Gross.
Were it not for the U.S. Women’s Mid-Am at Stonewall, this year in review post probably would have begun with the 12-foot putt for par that Braden Shattuck, the head of instruction at Rolling Green Golf Club, just buried to give him a one-shot victory in the PGA Professional Championship at Twin Warriors Golf Club in Santa Ana Pueblo, N.M. in early May.
The par save gave Shattuck a final round of 2-under 70 and a 9-under 279 total as he claimed a one-shot victory.
Shattuck, whose scholastic career at Sun Valley I chronicled once upon a time at the Daily Times, became just the second Philadelphia Section pro to win the event that once was dubbed the National Club Pro. That’s what it was called when Ed Dougherty, a Chester native and, like Shattuck, Delco through and through, captured the title in 1985.
Shattuck headed the Colebridge Financial PGA Team, the top 20 finishers in the PGA Professional Championship, that teed it up a few weeks later in the PGA Championship, one of golf’s four major professional championships, at Oak Hill Country Club in Pittsford, N.Y.
Shattuck, the Philadelphia Section’s Rolex Haverford Trust Player of the Year for the second straight year, will defend his title in next year’s PGA Professional Championship, which tees off April 28 at Fields Ranch at PGA Frisco, the new headquarters for the PGA of America in Texas.
That par putt by Shattuck was certainly a contender for this year in review’s Shot of the Year. But I decided to go back to the U.S. Women’s Mid-Am at Stonewall. This was a putt, too, and, although it didn’t go in, it was struck under an equal amount of duress.
As I mentioned earlier, Tara Joy-Connelly, my bag in the U.S. Women’s Mid-Am, was involved in a playoff among eight players for the final three spots in match play. A clutch tee shot at the North’s 170-yard, par-3 ninth hole helped Joy-Connelly survive the first hole of the playoff with a par.
Three of the eight players did not make par and it was on to the short par-4 10th hole with five players still alive for those final three spots in match play. Joy-Connelly’s approach came up short, leaving her on the front of the green with a putt the USGA website would later calculate as 70 feet to the difficult back pin with a swale in between, courtesy of Tom Doak. It was probably going to take a par to at least stay alive in the playoff.
Joy-Connelly is a terrific player. By the end of the first practice round on Doak’s challenging green complexes, she had the speed down. Those that never figured out the speed simply spent two days piling up three-putts, or worse.
We figured out that the putt was going to break four feet from right to left when it came out of the swale. Joy-Connelly’s first instinct on the line was absolutely correct and her speed, it was nothing short of perfect.
The putt stopped maybe three feet left of the hole and a few moments later Joy-Connelly calmly holed the par putt. We were in.
Joy-Connelly would fall in the opening round of match play to Rogowicz, one of the three qualifying co-medalists, 5 and 4. But she had given herself a chance with as tough a two-putt as you can find under pressure. And that first putt, just brilliant.
Had a pretty good fall in the second act of a caddying career that began when I was a kid at Merion, walking distance from where I grew up, and resumed in my 60s at Stonewall.
Helped Larry Martone capture a club championship at Stonewall in October, a nice bookend to the Merion club championship I had a front-row seat for on the bag for Bill Ginn Jr. in the late 1970s.
Later in October, I witnessed a win in the popular Fall Scramble at Stonewall for the second time in my second go-round as a looper at the ’Wall. Had the best individual player in the field in Gregor Orlando, a PIAA champion in 2007 with Erie Cathedral Prep and the BMW Philadelphia Amateur champion a decade later in 2017.
Orlando, who reached the second round of match play in the U.S. Mid-Amateur at Stonewall’s Old Course in 2016, and his Philadelphia Cricket Club pal Matt Kocent were so good, I was just along for the ride and it was a lot of fun to watch. Kocent, getting a look at the line in the scramble format, was deadly with the putter.
The good news is that there is plenty of great golf ahead in 2024 and I, for one, can’t wait.
