Two years ago in her U.S. Women’s Amateur qualifier, Siarra Stout waited out a rain delay, went back on the golf course and battled until dark, only to find out she’d missed it by one. The Women’s Am was headed to her home club that year, Golf Club of Tennessee just outside Nashville, and Stout desperately wanted to be in the field.
“I was definitely bummed just because I was like, how cool of a story would that have been to go to my first Am this close to home?” she said of that qualifier, which she had driven to North Carolina to play.
When Women’s Am week came around, Stout picked up Sierra Brooks’ bag instead and caddied for the Florida player (who now plays on the Symetra Tour) all the way to the Round of 16.
Growing up and playing golf so close to Vanderbilt, she got to know former Vanderbilt women’s assistant coach Holly Clark well. After Clark was hired as the head coach for the University of Charlotte’s start-up women’s golf team in 2015, Stout became the first player to commit. Now she’s about to enter her senior season.
Chasing a USGA championship berth has been a constant at all levels of Stout’s career. She has tried for the U.S. Girls’ Junior and the U.S. Women’s Amateur three times each, coming up one shot short of the Am the past two years. She also tried to qualify for the U.S. Women’s Open in 2019.
When Stout, 21, got a form email from the USGA earlier this summer, asking if she’d like to sign up for the Women’s Am on the off chance she’d get in as an alternate, she figured she didn’t have anything to lose.
The USGA is filling the fields for its four remaining 2020 championships entirely by exemption category. A big chunk of the U.S. Amateur and Women’s Amateur fields were filled by the World Amateur Golf Ranking. The top 75 players automatically earned a spot in the Women’s Am field, and Stout checked in at No. 251.
Still, she got the call. With international travel so complicated, the fall college season uncertain and COVID-19 cases climbing in the U.S., many top-ranked internationals aren’t in the field.
“If you’re looking at WAGR, it doesn’t look like I would ever make it into it,” she said. “But I’m glad I filled that out.”
After filling its exemption categories, the USGA continues to move down the WAGR list of “alternates,” with three more players below Stout in the rankings joining the field this week – Anna Morgan at No. 255, Valeria Mendizabal at No. 256 and Kajal Mistry at No. 257. Players can only be added to the field if they applied to play the championship by the July 8 deadline, as Stout did.
Six spots in the Women’s Am are earmarked for the top two finishers at a handful of other top women’s amateur events. Before Stout knew she was in the field, she figured she could increase her chances of playing that way. As a result, she’ll play the Ladies National Golf Association Amateur at Tennessee Grasslands in Gallatin, Tennessee, on July 27-29.
The USGA released its preliminary field list while Stout was in Pinehurst, North Carolina, for the North & South Women’s Amateur. A blinding migraine forced Stout to withdraw after the first round. Making it to match play there had been one of her major goals of 2020.
“I’m one of those people, I don’t think a goal is too big,” Stout said of how she maps out her year. “I set them and I believe that I can do them and I’m not really going to stop until I do. I have everything you can think of written down.”
She wanted her college team to win the Conference USA championship and reach the NCAA Women’s Championship in Arizona. She was going to enter qualifying again for the U.S. Women’s Open plus, of course, the Women’s Amateur.
She was also supposed to travel to Scotland, stay with teammates and play the British Women’s Amateur.
At Charlotte, Clark talks a lot about the process.
“I’m like, ‘What does that mean?’” Stout said. “… It took me some time to kind of understand what that meant and I wish I would have picked up on it a little bit sooner.”
Now she knows it has a lot to do with the little things, like going after what you want and that, eventually, the results will fall into place. Her Women’s Am adventure is a perfect example of that.
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