The defending champion is out of this U.S. Girls’s Beginner.
Auburn grad Megan Schofill, final 12 months’s champion at Bel-Air Nation Membership, led 2 up with six holes to play Wednesday at Southern Hills in Tulsa, Oklahoma. However Princeton’s Catherine Rao received every of the subsequent 4 holes, going eagle-birdie-birdie-birdie to flip the match on Schofill and advance to Thursday’s Spherical of 32 with a 2-and-1 victory.
“It does make it slightly bit sweeter,” Rao stated of knocking off the defending champ, “however on the finish of the day I’m out right here, and I feel the most important factor that I’ve realized in enjoying U.S. Beginner is I’m out right here to play golf and I’m competing towards myself greater than anybody else. I’m simply doing my factor, keep calm, and making an attempt to take the stress off. To me it doesn’t actually matter whether or not I’m enjoying towards the previous champion or somebody that I don’t even know.”
She’ll face one other faculty grad in former LSU standout Latanna Stone within the second spherical.
Rao was the Ivy League rookie of the 12 months as a freshman and superior to the quarterfinals of final summer season’s Girls’s British Beginner and U.S. Girls’s Beginner, however she missed her total sophomore season due to harm. Earlier this summer season, she once more made match play on the Girls’s British Beginner, dropping within the Spherical of 16.
Fourteen of the highest 20 within the Girls’s World Beginner Golf Rating, which was up to date Wednesday morning, teed it up this week, and all 14 made match play. Those self same gamers went 8-6 on Wednesday, although three of the highest 7 – UCLA’s Zoe Campos, USC’s Catherine Park and incoming Stanford freshman Andrea Revuelta – had been eradicated. Campos led USC’s Bailey Shoemaker, the latest runner-up on the Augusta Nationwide Girls’s Beginner, 2 up by way of 11 holes earlier than dropping, 1 down, as Shoemaker took the final gap with a bogey.
Shoemaker was the one participant to get by way of each a 20-for-10 playoff, which went simply two holes Wednesday morning, and her opening match.
“It doesn’t even really feel prefer it was in the present day,” Shoemaker stated of the playoff. “That was loopy. It’s my first ever USGA playoff. Clearly I used to be dissatisfied to even be in it, however it was a grind. I knew that if I simply make the par sport like we do at college, simply whoever makes essentially the most pars will win.”
Stanford, the reigning NCAA staff champion and unquestioned No. 1 coming into this fall, has only one participant nonetheless on this championship (Kelly Xu) after sophomore Paula Martin Sampedro additionally bowed out on Wednesday. Texas has essentially the most gamers remaining with 4 – Farah O’Keefe, Lauren Kim, Angelo Heo and Cindy Hsu.
World No. 5 Jasmine Koo, an incoming freshman at USC, is the highest-ranked participant remaining after she topped Texas’ Selena Liao, 2 up. Wake Forest grad Rachel Kuehn (8), Texas A&M’s reigning NCAA particular person champ Adela Cernousek (9) and up to date U.S. Women’ Junior winner Rianne Malixi (10) had been the opposite top-10 gamers to advance to the Spherical of 32. Kuehn, who is ready to show professional later this 12 months, scored essentially the most convincing win, a 7-and-5 rout of Palmer Cupper Mary Kelly Mulcahy, who went undefeated within the worldwide competitors final month. Kuehn’s subsequent opponent: Arkansas sophomore Maria Jose Marin, the highest seed because the stroke-play medalist, who beat Leigha Devine, 6 and 5.
