Summer golf is here, and Golfweek is keeping one of its amateur events going. For the fourth year, the Golfweek Hoosier Amateur will again be played at The Pfau Golf Course at Indiana University. The event will be a 54-hole event and will be ranked in the World Amateur Golf Ranking. There will be a men’s and women’s division.
“I’m going to be really old,” Stout said of an impending sixth year of college golf at Lipscomb.
Siarra Stout is in a season of second chances in her golf life.
“I’m going to be really old,” Stout said of an impending sixth year of college golf at Lipscomb, “but I’ve got one more year.”
In 2015, Stout became the first commit for the upstart Charlotte women’s golf program. Last fall, she transferred to Lipscomb to finish out two remaining years of eligibility left over from a redshirt season and a COVID year.
At Lipscomb, she won her first college tournament at the Rivertowne Invitational in March 2021. This week, she picked up the title at the Golfweek Hoosier Amateur, played on the teethy Pfau Course at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Stout was 10 over for 54 holes and edged Jocelyn Bruch, a redshirt sophomore at Purdue, by a shot. Things got dangerously close over the back nine at Pfau as Stout made three bogeys after the turn, but a birdie at the par-4 16th helped lift her permanently ahead of Bruch.
2022 Champion! Siarra Stout of Franklin, Tenn., with rounds of 75-74-74 to win by 1 shot over Jocelyn Bruch. pic.twitter.com/VBCm1bV9Md
“Anything can happen on this golf course but I think it just helped me kind of keep my poise as I finished off 17 and 18,” she said of that well-timed birdie.
Pfau is demanding off the tee, and Stout met that challenge by leaving herself in good positions from which to approach tricky greens. A heavy rain soaked the course after the second round, leaving the greens more receptive but the course playing longer. Still, Stout had to concentrate on placement.
And one reality remained: “Above the hole, if you were chipping, it was no bueno.”
Leading up to the Hoosier Amateur, Stout played a U.S. Women’s qualifier at Old Fort Golf Club in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, but came up four shots short of a playoff to make the field. Two years ago this week, Stout was making her U.S. Women’s Amateur debut at Woodmont Country Club in Rockville, Maryland. After close calls in qualifying the previous two years, she earned her spot in the field thanks to her position in the World Amateur Golf Ranking. In 2020, COVID forced the USGA to wipe out qualifying and select a field by hand.
Stout still has flashbacks to that week and is grateful for the opportunity. Lately, she’s taken a position of gratitude for many elements of her game and the experiences it has afforded her.
“I know (golf) doesn’t define me as a person and I really rest in that now for the first time,” she said.
Maybe it’s that mindset that has allowed Stout to thrive at Lipscomb. In 10 tournaments, she never finished outside the top 25 and led the team in scoring with a 74.7 average.
Stout is a big goal setter, and has her sights set on an NCAA postseason berth before her eligibility is up. Charlotte missed advancing as a team by a single shot when she was a sophomore and when she was a junior, COVID cut short the season when the 49ers were ranked inside the top 25 in the country. Last season, Stout was second individually at the Atlantic Sun Conference Championship. An individual title would have given her a postseason berth.
And after that? Stout is leaving the next step open. She’s always envisioned a professional golf career following college, but she didn’t enter LPGA Q-School this year. If she feels like her game is in a good place in another year, she still thinks she might go that route, but she also hasn’t missed the influx of youth into college coaching of late. That’s an attractive option, too.
“I don’t know when in my season of life that I would maybe go and step into that for a little bit but I definitely think it’s a neat place to go and make an impact on people’s lives and kind of grow them more than just a player – as a person,” she said. “My heart is definitely more toward that side of things just from a ministry standpoint.
The Purdue junior got it done after five playoff holes.
From the final group of the Golfweek Hoosier Amateur on Aug. 10, Nels Surtani had the benefit of watching the third round unfold ahead of him. Surtani, who had taken the 36-hole lead with a second-round 68, knew exactly what he needed to do to make a playoff coming down the final hole of the Pfau Course at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, so he made the necessary 6-footer – a downhill left-to-right breaker – for a final-round 73. That put him at 2 over for 54 holes and forced a playoff.
The sun dropped lower and lower as Surtani, who will be a junior at Purdue, battled with incoming Indiana freshman Cal Hoskins, who had posted a final-round 71 to catch Surtani. After three extra holes, there still wasn’t a winner.
“At this point after the third playoff hole, I was really tired and my yardages, my clubs were starting to go shorter,” Surtani said. “I could tell I was getting fatigued and I really had to concentrate to stay in it.”
On the fourth extra hole, the par-4 10th, Hoskins lost his drive in the woods but chipped in for par. Surtani missed a birdie putt to win and the pair went on. Surtani finally closed out Hoskins on the fifth extra hole.
Surtani will take his hardware home to Noblesville, Indiana, before heading back to Purdue later this month, but Hoskins gets to take on the Pfau challenge over and over again.
“I’m really excited to play it a lot because I feel like that’s just kind of what you need – something that’s really difficult,” he said of the Hoosiers’ home course. “It definitely beat me up in the brain for three days straight.”
Surtani, who finished T-47 two years at the Golfweek Hoosier Amateur, is on a two-tournament winning streak, having picked up his first-ever amateur title last month at the Northern Amateur. Where his game is concerned, he had something of an epiphany last summer while scrolling Instagram, and it all started with Jon Rahm.
In answering a question about his uniquely compact swing, Rahm revealed that he was born with a club foot. It was a big headline in the run-up to the 2021 British Open, and it had Surtani’s attention. He could relate, having also been born with a club foot. His left leg is an inch shorter than his right.
“We always knew my left leg was shorter, but we never attributed that to any of the issues I had in my swing,” Surtani said, explaining that for years he had gotten stuck on the inside on his downswing.
Surtani loves to read about the golf swing, so he spent a few days observing Rahm and studying. After some trial and error, he began lifting his left heel before he swings. It was a simple move that brought big change.
“It’s probably the best thing I’ve ever done as far as in my golf game,” he said. “Just started to become more confident and hitting better shots.”
Surtani hasn’t worked with a swing instructor for more than two years, and lifting his left heel is the most significant change he’s made to his swing in that time. Purdue head coach Rob Bradley will give him a tip now and then, but mostly Surtani has been navigating his swing by himself lately. He’s worked hard on his chipping over the past year, and it’s another big reason for the results he’s seeing now – that, and mental game.
“I don’t feel like I’m a better ballstriker or longer than I have been in the past year but I’ve become more confident in my game this past year,” he said. “I feel like I turned a corner this summer, for sure.”
Surtani won the Northern Amateur wire to wire and called it one of the best tournaments he’s played in his career. But at the Pfau Course for the Hoosier Amateur, he didn’t feel like he had his best game.
The Steve Smyers-designed Pfau Course, which opened in June 2020, can be exhausting.
“It’s just every hole is a potential double-bogey and you have to be very conscious of where you hit your shot, where you miss it,” he said.
Surtani last played this course during the fall of 2020, when the college golf season was shut down amid the COVID-19 pandemic. It wasn’t a great week.
“It was a good comeback,” Surtani said of his return.
The new Pfau Course at Indiana University has teeth, and it showed them to a field of college-age amateurs at the Golfweek Hoosier Amateur.
Erica Shepherd knows difficult greens. A year and a half ago, she finished T-23 at the inaugural Augusta National Women’s Amateur with a final-round 75 on that jewel of the south.
So when Shepherd, winner of this weekend’s Golfweek Hoosier Amateur, says that the new Pfau Course at Indiana University is the hardest course she’s played since Augusta National, it means something.
“I think the only thing that makes it not as hard is it has zoysia fairways,” she said. “You always have a good lie in the fairways and chipping is not too bad.”
Before Pfau, the last time Shepherd and her older brother Ethan , a senior at Indiana, played in the same tournament, they were just kids – maybe 10 years old, Erica guesses. But for the Shepherd family, there was competition within the competition this weekend at Pfau. They had matching 75s in the first round of the Golfweek Hoosier Amateur, but Erica took off from there.
Her closing 69 was at least two shots better than any other player in the women’s field on Sunday, and the only sub-70 score posted. She finished the week 2 over, a winner by five shots.
Erica had the advantage of seeing the Pfau Course shortly after it opened this summer. Ethan invited her down to play, and it turned into a match with a few of his teammates.
“We actually ended up getting in some arguments on what I should hit,” she joked. Erica remembers facing a 180-yard shot and Ethan trying to convince her to take three clubs less. She wasn’t having it.
But that’s the kind of strategy Pfau demands.
Erica Shepherd
“At least 70 percent of the greens work front to back so the first five yards before the green is above the green,” Erica said after the final round of the Hoosier Amateur. “There were some shots, at least three of our holes today, where I played a number like 40 yards less than the pin. You can kind of run it up there. If you land on the green, you’ll go over the green and front is a much easier chip.”
For the first time in months, Erica stood over putts at the Pfau Course and felt like they had a chance to go in. Putting has been a year-long struggle, she said, and she felt it particularly at the U.S. Women’s Amateur. She missed the match-play cut by one after two days of beautiful ball-striking and weeks of thorough preparation.
“I couldn’t even tell you how many putts I had, how many inside-3-footers I missed,” she said.
Annabelle Pancake, a fellow Indiana native, tied for third eight shots behind Shepherd at the Hoosier Amateur. How hard did the course play? The Clemson freshman had a first-round 80. Credit her for rebounding with subsequent rounds of 71-72.
“I just didn’t hit the ball well and had what felt like 100 three-putts,” she said of that opening 18.
Pancake says Pfau is a course where you have to keep it in play. It’s a course best described with big adjectives: a monster, crazy and very difficult, but very cool.
It certainly will show you what you need to work on and expose a player who goes in without a game plan.
“If you hit a bad shot, it’s going to show,” she said. “If you hit it off-line, you’re probably going to get a bad kick. A lot of the greens were really difficult, they were running really fast this week, they had a lot of undulation in them as well.”
In the men’s division, Illinois junior Tommy Kuhl kept a level head to finish on top. After 36 holes on Saturday, Kuhl had a two-shot advantage on a group of three players. His closing 77 left him with a two-shot win at 5 over.
Tommy Kuhl
“I think it says a lot about the course and the potential the course does have,” Kuhl said of those numbers. “It’s a championship-style course but personally I love tournaments like this that are very difficult and par is a good score. I like grinding it out. The course, it was awesome.”
Kuhl won for the first time since claiming the Illinois Junior Amateur the summer before his freshman year of college. Twice before in his Illinois career, Kuhl had built a 36-hole individual lead but was unable to close.
“I think looking back on those and using those to my advantage today was very beneficial,” he said.
For Joe Weiler, a Bloomington, Indiana, native who plays for Purdue, a T-6 finish at Pfau was solid but left him wanting a little more. Still, Weiler wasn’t at all surprised to see a winning score over par after 54 holes.
Weiler had played Pfau twice in the summer, when it was a completely different golf course because of wetter, softer conditions. Colder weather firmed up the place, and that was particularly noticeable on the greens.
“It was fun because you had to think around every shot,” he said. “The best player is going to win there. You have to hit a lot of different shots.”
Weiler knows something about difficulty, considering that Purdue’s home golf course is the challenging Kampen course in West Lafayette, Indiana.
“It’s just being over shots that are difficult and you gotta think about,” Weiler said. “IU this year has a huge upgrade with that course.”
Two Midwest natives, Tommy Kuhl and Erica Shepherd, took the lead at the Golfweek Hoosier Amateur.
Tommy Kuhl was careful to take note of the wind as he played a late nine at the Pfau Course at Indiana University the day before the Golfweek Hoosier Amateur. Kuhl played the front, but only got to walk the back nine at the new course in Bloomington, Indiana.
“It’s a beautiful course, it’s a big course. A championship-style course,” said Kuhl, an Illinois junior who is leading the tournament after a double-round Saturday. “The thing I notice that’s unique about it is it flows with the wind really well. That’s one thing I really examined when I got there.”
In a prevailing southwest wind, Kuhl managed to leave himself in good positions around firm new greens and get to 1 under for 36 holes. He’s the only player on the men’s leaderboard who managed to get under par.
Short game has been something Kuhl has devoted time to recently. He didn’t need to be creative with his shots on Saturday because he was smart with his approaches.
“Especially with how new and firm the course is, I think it’s just about being patient, especially on a 36-hole day,” Kuhl said of the key to his good play. “I knew coming into today it would be a brutal long day with how hilly the course is and how cold and windy it was.”
Kuhl leads a group of three players by two shots, including Connor Glynn, Varun Chopra and Nick Tenuta.
Kuhl got in the double-round-day mindset when he competed in a two-day Golf Coaches Association of America event at the University of Illinois Golf Club in Champaign, Illinois, last month. He also kept it sharp over the summer, competing in local Midwest events but also traveling to Arizona for the Saguaro Amateur and to South Carolina for the Palmetto Amateur.
As a Big 10 player, it will be up to Kuhl to keep his season alive this fall. There won’t be team events, so Kuhl is testing himself this way.
“At Illinois, we always try and keep it competitive,” he said. “Coach (Mike Small) kind of keeps it up to us of what we want to do to get our game better. For me, personally, that was playing in tournaments.”
Erica Shepherd, a Duke sophomore, is in the same boat in the ACC. Shepherd fired rounds of 75-71 to finish the day at 4 over and take the lead in the girls division. Last month, Shepherd, an Indiana native, finished third at the Golfweek Caledonia Amateur.
Ashley Kozlowski trails by two shots and Emma Carpenter is in third another shot back.
