Leona Maguire, Celine Boutier, and Ana Belac each met the world ranking qualifications for the Olympics last week.
The two highest-ranked players from each country (unless one country has more than two within the top 15 of the Rolex Rankings) earned their way in until the field of 60 was filled out.
Boutier will play for the hosting country of France while Maguire and Belac will represent Ireland and Slovenia, respectively.
One of the most successful professional athletes in school history, Boutier already has six LPGA Tour wins at the age of 30. She won four times in 2023, including her first major at the Evian Championship last July.
Maguire put together one of the most decorated collegiate golf careers in NCAA history. She became the first golfer to win the ANNIKA Award as the nation’s best player twice, taking it home in 2015 and 2017, and her 135 weeks atop the Women’s Amateur Golf Rankings held as a record for five years until Stanford’s Rose Zhang torched every mark.
She’s won two LPGA Tour events during her professional career thus far.
Belac earned her way onto the LPGA Tour after a Player of the Year campaign on the Symetra Tour in 2020. She has two career top-10s in LPGA events.
Ana Belac isn’t wasting any time as an LPGA rookie and has put together two powerful rounds at the Pure Silk LPGA Championship.
Two years ago at this time, Ana Belac was a senior on the Duke roster, helping her Blue Devils work their way through NCAA Championship week and ultimately to the national title. Belac was a big part of Duke’s seventh NCAA trophy – its first in match play – and hasn’t looked back since charting her career as a professional.
The 24-year-old from Slovenia finished first on the Symetra Tour money list last year, which earned her LPGA membership for the 2021 season as well as a start in the U.S. Women’s Open in December. Now, she’s lurking on an LPGA leaderboard.
After rounds of 70-67 at the Pure Silk Championship, Belac is tied for second with big names Jessica Korda and Stacy Lewis. They all trail Australian Sarah Kemp by a shot at Kingsmill in Williamsburg, Virginia.
This is a particularly big week for Belac considering it’s the last week before the first reshuffle of the 2021 LPGA Tour season.
“It’s in the back of my mind,” Belac said. “My ultimate goal, my life goal, is to play on the LPGA and do well here. I try not to think about it [the reshuffle] when I’m on the course and just play my game.”
Ana Belac waits on a green during the practice round at the 2020 U.S. Women’s Open at Champions Golf Club in Houston, Texas on Monday, Dec. 7, 2020. (Simon Bruty/USGA)
Belac had a steady round with five birdies and a bogey. Korda, on the other hand, does what Korda does, and that’s create fireworks. She eagled the par-5 seventh and the par-5 15th.
“I just try to put myself in the right positions, and luckily I was able to have a good amount of birdie opportunities and saved a good amount of par putts,” said Korda on how her round went. “Obviously the eagles help. If you take those eagles away, I would’ve shot even par today, so eagles always help.”
Korda won the season opening Tournament of Champions in January.
As for Kemp, a second-round 67 that included six birdies helped her get to 6 under and the solo lead.
“It was great. Had a really good warmup. I just felt really good,” said Kemp who said she slept great the night before. “And sometimes you just feel like you’re going to play well, and it was one of those days. Hit some great shots. Made some putts. I didn’t miss a whole lot of fairways. Probably had under 30 putts, and that leads to 4-under.”
Paula Creamer, making her first LPGA start since October 2019 this week, fired rounds of 76-74 to miss the cut by five shots.
Ana Belac transitioned quickly from college golf to a professional career, finishing on top of the Symetra Tour money list for a USWO start.
When Ana Belac won the Symetra Tour’s Carolina Classic on Oct. 31, she did it with purple hair. Her long, colorful locks will make Belac easy to distinguish from the crop of U.S. Women’s Open first-timers at Champions Golf Club in Houston this week.
Belac’s long hair had been purple earlier in the Symetra season before she traded out for blue – bright blue – and then went purple again. Belac, the 23-year-old from Slovenia, is naturally a brunette but her hair has seen a rainbow of colors. It doesn’t stand for anything in particular, Belac said. She just likes to experiment.
“Maybe I’ll surprise everyone with something that hasn’t been seen seen before,” she mused a month before her first U.S. Women’s Open start. “Although purple has brought me two victories so far, so I kind of like purple.”
Belac doesn’t quite remember when she learned that limited spots in the U.S. Women’s Open were on offer to Symetra Tour players this season along with LPGA status. It certainly didn’t change anything about the way she went about her first few months as a professional.
“I heard it somewhere,” she said. “I tried not to think much about it, because the more things you think about, the more pressure you add in.”
Belac is among the 41 first-time competitors in the U.S. Women’s Open field. She earned her spot by finishing among the top 5 players on the season-end Symetra Tour money list. Belac made nine Symetra Tour starts since turning professional in April, not long after the 2020 college season ended prematurely because of COVID.
That decision didn’t require a lot of thinking. Belac always knew she wanted to play professionally. She had earned Symetra Tour status at LPGA Q-School in the fall of 2019 and even though Duke head coach Dan Brooks told her he’d find a spot on the roster for her if she wanted to return for a post-COVID fifth year, Belac was ready to close that chapter.
“I accomplished a lot in my college career. I wish I got another chance at nationals but at the same time I won nationals last year with my team,” she said. “Maybe it would have been different if that hadn’t happened, but my ultimate goal was always to play professionally and knowing that I had my degree – I finished my degree in May – that kind of made my decision easier and I was just so excited to turn pro.”
Ana Belac during the second round of the 2019 NCAA Women’s National Golf Championship at the Blessings Golf Club Fayetteville, Arkansas. (Photo: Tim Cowie)
Brooks remains Belac’s swing coach, and she’s still based in Durham, North Carolina. Her roots are so firm there that she calls her Carolina Classic victory on the Symetra Tour a home win.
“A lot of things can affect if you’re going to finish in the top and luckily I did really well in the highest purse of the season so that kind of boosted me up a little bit,” she said of that victory, which netted her $30,000.
Beginning with the Symetra Tour’s Florida swing in September, Belac had her mom Erika on her bag. Belac said mom knew enough about golf to know what to do on the course but not enough to give advice.
“Which is great,” added Belac, an independent player who likes to make her own decisions.
Still, it was nice to have the companionship – and someone to help her do the driving. During a round, Belac and her mom would often try to spot which yards had dogs.
“We’d remember and then the next day we’re like, where is that dog from yesterday?” Belac said.
At home in Slovenia, Belac has a cat named Hilton. She hasn’t been home since last Christmas, and isn’t sure if she’ll head home for the holidays after the U.S. Women’s Open. The last thing she wants is to get stuck there should COVID travel restrictions arise again.
Belac won $49,081 in her nine Symetra starts, enough to put her on top of the season-long money list. She hopes some of that can go toward getting a dog to bring home to her Durham apartment. She’s always wanted a Husky.
This week, Belac will be one of four Duke players in the field. When Brooks was recruiting Belac at the 2015 ANNIKA Invitational Europe, he walked up on a par 3 to watch her swing for the first time, began recording and she made a hole-in-one. It remains her only hole-in-one to date, but she wouldn’t mind repeating a similar feat this week with another.
“Clutch moments,” she joked. “U.S. Opens and things like that.”
