Tag: Golfweek Caledonia Amateur

Emily Mahar outlasts Caroline Curtis for Golfweek Caledonia Amateur title

Virginia Tech’s Emily Mahar made the most of an opportunity by winning the Golfweek Caledonia Amateur in an uncertain fall season.

PAWLEYS ISLAND, S.C. – A playoff is not the time to test yardages. This thought occurred to Emily Mahar as she lobbed 7-iron after 7-iron over the marsh fronting No. 18 green at Caledonia Golf and Fish Club. With a tailwind figuring in, Mahar kept hitting the back of the green.

“I should have hit one less, because I was long every single time, but I knew that if I was long of the pin, at least I wasn’t short in the water,” she said.

When the wind picked up at Caledonia on Tuesday, the closing hole over water factored in in a big way. Ultimately, Alabama sophomore Caroline Curtis and Mahar made three additional trips down that hole before Mahar came out on top with one final par. Curtis, who had a final-round 68, left the door open when she missed the green short and right to finish at 8 under total, a number Mahar had reached with her final-round 67.

Scores: Golfweek Caledonia Amateur

“I played a lot of good holes, I just happened to have one bad one at the wrong time,” said Curtis.

Curtis had the opportunity to win outright when she faced a 20-footer for birdie on the final hole. When she barely missed, sudden death kicked in. Curtis, too, was also questioning club choice. She found herself hitting a three-quarter 9-iron over and over again but didn’t want to move down to pitching wedge.

Emily Mahar with the Golfweek Caledonia Amateur trophy. (Golfweek photo)

All day in the final round, players were aware of the challenge the 18th would present.

“Gotta be under par heading into 18,” said Erica Shepherd, the Duke sophomore who finished third at 7 under.

Her teammate Megan Furtney, who finished T-7, had a similar thought.

“Just hit and prayed,” joked Furtney. Both players made par there Tuesday for the first time all week.

As for Mahar and Curtis, the two head home to decidedly different fall college golf seasons. Curtis and her four Alabama teammates who entered the Golfweek Caledonia Amateur were headed back to Tuscaloosa – a 10-hour drive – to ready for team qualifying. The first of six rounds will begin next weekend. The SEC will play a three-event fall season.

In the ACC, where Mahar competes with the Hokies, there won’t be team golf. The lack of playing opportunities, and ongoing uncertainty amid a pandemic, has taught Mahar to cherish the tournaments she can compete in. Until the night before the final round, Mahar didn’t even know when her next tournament would be. She signed up for the Griffin Amateur, however, on Monday night. That will take place mid-October.

It feels particularly good to win, given those limited starts. Mahar, a native Australian ranked No. 108 in the World Amateur Golf Ranking, isn’t totally sure, but she thinks Tuesday marked the third time she’s been in a playoff. Earlier this summer, she lost the VSGA Stroke Play Championship to teammate Becca DeNunzio – who stood beside the 18th hole Tuesday along with another Tech teammate, Jessica Spicer – in extra holes.

Asked what this victory meant, Mahar pointed to the work she’s done on her game. Recently, that work has taken place on the putting green, and it paid off at Caledonia. Mahar says she finally has her stroke where she wants it.

“It obviously means that I’m working hard enough,” Mahar said of the win. “Sometimes I may feel like I’m taking too much time off, but it just proves that I have a good balance right now. I can take the time off to focus on school and the other things that I need to and then when it’s time to golf, it’s time to focus on golf.

“I think it just really reassure me that what I’m doing is working.”

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Local product Smith Knaffle looking to go the distance at Golfweek Caledonia Amateur

Smith Knaffle feels she has hit it more solid, straighter and gotten a little longer in every aspect of her game.

PAWLEYS ISLAND, S.C. – It’s difficult for Smith Knaffle to put a number on recent distance gains. This week in wet conditions, it’s all carry at Caledonia Golf and Fish Club, a course that, as a Myrtle Beach area local, Knaffle knows relatively well.

Knaffle, the South Carolina sophomore who has a one-shot lead at the Golfweek Caledonia Amateur, made six birdies and a single bogey in a second-round 5-under 66 that moved her into the lead. She’s a shot ahead of Alabama sophomore Caroline Curtis.

It’s been awhile since Knaffle entered the final round of a tournament in the lead.

“Just with college golf and everything, trying to gain a spot in the top 5,” she said. “I just haven’t really played my best the last year or two. I’m happy to be playing more golf that’s like myself.”

Knaffle shares a swing coach with recent FedEx Cup champion Dustin Johnson. She works with area teacher Allen Terrell, who runs the Dustin Johnson Golf School in Myrtle Beach. She’ll get a lesson as often as possible when she’s home, but says it depends what the two work on. One constant has been the pursuit of distance.

Scores: Golfweek Caledonia Amateur

“We’re always working on trying to get shaft lean at impact and just hit it as far as possible,” she said. “That’s always kind of the main goal, to hit it as far and as straight as possible. We try a lot of different things to accomplish the same goal.”

While she can’t put a number on that progress, Knaffle feels she has hit it more solid, straighter and gotten a little longer in every aspect of her game. She has hit 3-woods and drivers this week on a saturated Caledonia layout that endured upwards of 10 inches of rain days before the tournament started.

This individual event is certainly a different start to the season for the sophomore, who competed three times with the team in her debut season – one cut short by COVID. The SEC players in the field will get to compete with their teams later this fall in three events. The first one of those will happen next month at Blessings Golf Club in Fayetteville, Arkansas, site of the 2019 NCAA Championship.

A good showing here would go a long way in getting Knaffle’s year started on the right foot.

“I just came to play, I didn’t really have anything set in mind,” she said of what she wanted to get out of this week. “Just to come out here and do the best I can.”

Curtis, the Alabama player, is thinking of this week as a nice tune-up. There are four Crimson Tide players in the field. Next weekend, they begin qualifying for the season.

“We’re just trying to keep playing, stay competitive,” said Curtis, who hasn’t had a bogey yet in rounds of 69-68. “I know for me, and I think for my teammates too, the best kind of practice is in tournaments and being able to play against other people and just see how your game lines up with everything else.”

Curtis is aiming to keep her game plan intact in the final round as she chases a title. She wanted to see where her game was when she entered this tournament. A win would be a good indicator.

For Curtis, potential obstacles might come in the form of ACC chasers. Virginia Tech’s Emily Mahar and Louisville’s Lauren Hartlage, plus East Carolina Riley Hamilton, are among the trio a stroke back in third. Mahar’s third-round 67 was bogey-free, and ended with a birdie on a difficult par-4 closing hole over water.

Mahar’s last tournament came a month ago when she competed in the VSGA Stroke Play. A runner-up finish there came on the heels of a trip to the Round of 32 at the U.S. Women’s Amateur and the Round of 16 at the North & South Women’s Amateur.

She doesn’t find herself itching to compete but is trying to take this opportunity to work on her game and get stronger. The gaps in competition have brought an unexpected change in mindset – one that Mahar thinks has been beneficial.

“I think the best thing to come out of this was how my mental game has improved. We don’t get many opportunities to play now, so being able to appreciate the time we can play has helped stay in the moment and not think ahead, like I’ll just play next week it’s no big deal. Right now, I don’t know when my next tournament is going to be.”

Brynn Walker writes her way through a fifth year at UNC, pulling back the curtain on a COVID detour

UNC-Chapel Hill fifth-year senior Brynn Walker has never liked the “highlight reel” quality of social media. Instead, she created a blog.

PAWLEYS ISLAND, S.C. – Brynn Walker has never liked the “highlight reel” aspect of social media. She wants to pull back the curtain more than that, and a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill recently helped her figure out how.

Walker enrolled in a class called “Branding of Me” last spring. The bulk of the grade was assigned according to how successfully she created a blog to brand herself. It took about three weeks to figure out how she’d structure the project. Learn to brand yourself, her professor explained, and you can brand anything. That’s key for a broadcast journalism major like Walker.

“He would have individual meetings with us and he was like, you need to think hard about what you stand for, what you want your blog to be about,” she said.

Walker loves penning messages in birthday cards, especially to her three older siblings. She calls herself an “inspiration junkie,” and that itself gave her a bit of inspiration.

“If I could somehow through my journey in golf, inspire other people by writing and documenting, I think it would be pretty cool,” she said. “That’s kind of the main basis of it. I picked different experiences, different people and then bring it all together with some kind of lesson.”

Even after Walker, who is sticking around for a fifth year at UNC, ceased to be graded for her entries, she kept writing. When she decided she’d be taking that victory lap, she blogged about it. She couched it on the team van she fell in love with on her first recruiting trip to Chapel Hill. The entry is called “One more lap in the big blue van.”

She kept going, even though inspiration amid quarantine was hard to find. But the experiences eventually came back. When she learned she’d get to play the U.S. Women’s Amateur for an unexpected fifth time in August, she blogged. And she blogged about the significance of a sponsor exemption she has received for the ShopRite LPGA Classic in October.

Her followers now know her connection to tournament venue Seaview Resort in Galloway, New Jersey, where the Walker family has long vacationed. Brynn had annually tried qualifying for the ShopRite, which always fell around her birthday. When she was 18, tournament officials granted her a pass through the amateur qualifier and into the Monday qualifier. She played her way into the tournament for the first time that year.

The best part of watching sports, Walker believes, is connecting with athletes as people. She has provided a way for her followers to know her that way.

“I love that stuff, I feed off of it,” she said. “So I try to put some more out there.”

A blog about the hard days in golf centered around this question, posed to her by instructor John Dunigan: “How do you handle the inconsistencies of golf?”

Walker jokingly answered ice cream, but then she dug deeper. Encourage others and get back up, she wrote, setting that apart in bold green type. And finally, Our value doesn’t come from what we do; it comes from who we are.

Walker loves it when younger girls read her entries and message her that they feel the same emotions. She has succeeded in revealing a side of this journey we don’t often see.

“I want mine to be authentic,” she said of communicating in a more long-form way than Twitter or Instagram. “In my blog, that’s why I talk about the ups and downs. Hopefully, people can relate.”

Walker’s story has been decidedly shaped by COVID, mostly in the form of timing. After her spring season was canceled, she faced difficult decisions about how to spend the next year of her life. She never dreamed “how crazy it would become.” When LPGA Q-School canceled Q-School for 2020, Walker made the decision to return to Chapel Hill.

Walker was among the senior student-athletes to benefit from a generous move by UNC men’s basketball coach Roy Williams, who donated more than $600,000 in May to fund scholarships for spring sports seniors. Walker found Williams on the range at UNC Finley Golf Course one day to say thank you.

When she tees it up at the Shoprite, it will be for the third time. It would have been her professional debut, but that transition will have to wait. She’ll still put Dunigan on the bag and use it as a look at a professional career that remains on the horizon, albeit the distant horizon.

“Everything happens for a reason, you gotta believe so,” Walker said. “I think that this year, maybe I just need one more year to prepare.”

And to write.

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Lauren Hartlage, Golfweek Caledonia Amateur leader, finds perks in the new normal

Not every COVID-forced work-around, at least where golf is concerned, has been awful. Lauren Hartlage has found benefits in the new normal.

PAWLEYS ISLAND, S.C. – Not every COVID-forced work-around, at least where golf is concerned, has brought heartache. Lauren Hartlage has actually found benefits in the new normal.

Case in point: After playing her way to a two-shot lead at the Golfweek Caledonia Amateur, the fifth-year Louisville senior planned to put her feet up on the beach. Her boyfriend Nicholas Tenuta will be in the chair next to her. Tenuta spent the day playing across the street from Caledonia Golf & Fish Club at the Golfweek True Blue Amateur.

Tenuta’s opening round of 3-over 75 left him T-55.

Hartlage and Tenuta are the only players from Louisville among the 148 college-age amateurs competing on Pawleys Island this week. The Atlantic Coast Conference, however, is well-represented – to the tune of 17 players split between both fields.

Scores: Golfweek Caledonia Amateur

“It’s fun,” Hartlage said. “We’re on the beach, I get to play golf. You wish you got to play with your team but you take advantage of what you can and make the most of it.”

Last spring, COVID might as well have been synonymous with canceled when it came to college athletics. There was so little to play in the spring that Hartlage branched out. She signed up for the Colorado Women’s Open and traveled 1,000 miles from her Elizabethtown, Kentucky, home to play in a mixed field of amateurs and professionals (even some LPGA players).

The next month, she teed it up in a Women’s All-Pro Tour event in Arkansas. She played the final round with eventual winner Maria Fassi. Hartlage finished fifth.

Hartlage doesn’t have any Symetra Tour status and would be starting on a professional career about now if there was an opportunity for advancement. With no LPGA Q-School in the fall, there isn’t.

Louisville happened to be looking for another player this season.

“I was like, ‘What would you think if I stayed?’” Hartlage suggested.

Coach Whitney Young was all for it, but Hartlage knows other players haven’t been so lucky to have an open spot for the taking.

Hartlage’s round of 4-under 67 on Sunday included five birdies and just one bogey on the par-4 10th. She leads a group of players at 2 under that includes North Carolina’s Brynn Walker, Charlotte’s Ellinor Sudow, Alabama’s Caroline Curtis and Duke’s Megan Furtney.

South Carolina sophomore Smith Knaffle is one more shot back. Knaffle, a native of nearby Murrell’s Inlet, dropped a shot with at the 18th, a closing par 4 over water, but drew applause from the crowded back porch of Caledonia’s clubhouse all the same.

Knaffle annually plays the First Tee outing at Caledonia. Her dad Jim is the superintendent at International Club, roughly 25 miles up the road from Caledonia. She’s the local favorite, with a handful of rounds under her belt here.

“Not as many as you would think but enough to know what I’m doing,” said Knaffle, who was named after her maternal grandmother, Betty Smith.

Pawleys Island suffered a deluge four days ago, with eight inches of rain falling in a 12-hour period. Knaffle felt the soggy ground added a couple hundred yards to the golf course.

Unlike many players in the Caledonia field, Knaffle will have the opportunity to play this fall with her South Carolina team. The Gamecocks will compete along with the rest of the SEC in three fall events. Caledonia is serving simply as a warm-up. The first SEC event, the Blessings Collegiate Invitational in Fayetteville, Arkansas, is still three weeks away.

Knaffle made three starts with the team as a freshman. The roster included World No. 1-ranked amateur Pauline Roussin-Bouchard. Pimnipa Panthong, a three-time All-American at Kent State, has transferred in for a fifth year with the Gamecocks. Knaffle chose this roster for the challenge and has learned much from her world-beating teammates.

“For me, it’s just not being so hard on myself,” she said, “and letting myself be free and play.”

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