Ladies’s Mid-Am chief fires solely spherical beneath par at 6 months pregnant

On the 2024 U.S. Ladies’s Mid-Newbie championship, held this 12 months at Brae Burn Nation Membership in West Newton, Mass., the historic course performed robust in Spherical 1. So robust, in truth, that the scoring common for Spherical 1 was 80.1, and just one participant within the subject managed to shoot beneath par.

That participant was Alexandra Austin, who fired a gap spherical of two-under 70 — the one crimson quantity within the 132-player subject — and much more impressively, she did it whereas six months pregnant. Austin’s child boy is due in January.

The Fairfax, Va.-based insurance coverage agent and skilled beginner is competing in her fourth U.S. Ladies’s Mid-Am. She made it to the quarterfinals in final 12 months’s version of the championship. She additionally made it to the semi-finals of the 2016 U.S. Ladies’s Newbie 4-Ball alongside associate Lauren Greenlief.

Austin’s three-birdie, one-bogey spherical was highlighted by a near-ace on the 218-yard par-3 seventeenth at Brae Burn.

“I hit 3-wood,” Austin instructed the USGA after her spherical. “It was nearly entering into. I used to be like, Oh that’d be nice, after which I can’t drink.”

Simply behind Austin on the leaderboard is Jacqueline Setas at even par, and three gamers at one-over par, together with final 12 months’s U.S. Ladies’s Mid-Am runner-up, Kelsey Chugg, and Austin’s former four-ball associate, Greenlief. Defending champ Kimberly Dinh was T23 after posting a rating of four-over 76. 

Austin and the remainder of the sphere will full the stroke-play portion of the championship with Spherical 2 on Sunday. From there, the highest 64 gamers will probably be seeded in match play, with the Spherical of 64 happening on Monday, the Spherical of 32 and the Spherical of 16 on Tuesday, quarterfinals and semifinals on Wednesday, and the ultimate 18-hole match on Thursday. You may observe the motion right here.

Golf.com Editor

As a four-year member of Columbia’s inaugural class of feminine varsity golfers, Jessica can out-birdie everybody on the masthead. She will be able to out-hustle them within the workplace, too, the place she’s primarily answerable for producing each print and on-line options, and overseeing main particular initiatives, equivalent to GOLF’s inaugural Type Is­sue, which debuted in February 2018. Her origi­nal interview collection, “A Spherical With,” debuted in November of 2015, and appeared in each within the journal and in video type on GOLF.com.