The Kentucky women’s golf team stands if first place in the NEXUS Collegiate Tournament
The University of Kentucky women’s golf team is in first place after two rounds in the NEXUS Collegiate Tournament at the Albany Golf Club, in Nassau, Bahamas.
Through two rounds, all six wildcat golfers are in the top 20 of the individual leaderboard, out of the 66 individual golfers in attendance. The team is sitting at three over par for the tournament, three strokes ahead of Iowa State, who is in second, and seven strokes ahead of third place North Texas.
Senior All-American Laney Frye leads the Wildcats at two under par, and sits at second in the tournament. She is three shots behind leader Isabel Sy. Frye is looking for her first individual title.
Also in the top 20 for the Wildcats are Jensen Castle, who is tied for fifth at even par, Marissa Wenzler, who is tied for tenth at two over par and then Marta López Echevarría, María Villanueva Aperribay and Cathryn Brown who are all tied for twentieth at five over par.
The final round of the tournament tees off at 8 am EST on Wednesday, February 14th. The team is looking for their first win of the season and their third in the past two seasons.
The groundwork for Marissa Wenzler’s Women’s Western Amateur run were laid during a COVID summer.
Marissa Wenzler wasn’t quite sure exactly what would happen when she arrived at her family reunion carting a giant Women’s Western Amateur trophy from a victory that was only a few hours old. After a final match against Oklahoma State’s Maddison Hinson-Tolchard that went two extra holes on Saturday at Park Ridge (Illinois) Country Club, that’s where the 20-year-old Kentucky sophomore was headed.
“I think everyone is going to be pretty excited,” she said. “I have a great support system, my family, friends, teammates, coaches, everyone.”
While the family gathering took off back home, Wenzler walked the fairways alone with her boyfriend Conor Stoly, a towering 6-foot-8-inch college basketball player (Stoly is transferring from Thomas Moore, a small school in Kentucky, to Ohio State, where he’ll play a year on the club team to transition). Stoly isn’t a golfer, but he showed a knack for reading greens at Park Ridge. That, and helping Wenzler deal with the nerves.
“He knows what it’s like to be in that competitive mode, that pressure situation,” Wenzler said. “I think that helped us to work together really well.”
When Stoly agreed to accompany Wenzler to the tournament, she asked him to pick up the bag. That’s a job often reserved for Wenzler’s older brother Ryan, who has played on the Mackenzie and Latinoamerica tours. The siblings joked about what would happen if Wenzler were to win with Stoly on the bag. Despite the run at Park Ridge, big bro hasn’t lost his gig for later in the summer.
So much of what Wenzler learned at the 2020 U.S. Women’s Amateur and Ladies National Golf Association Amateur – she finished runner-up at the latter to gain entry to the former – have paved the way for the success she’s experienced since, particularly this week.
“To play on a big stage like that has really helped me with having all these people watch today or dealing with the stress of situations,” she said, “but that (LNGA) event is definitely what helped me get to where I am.”
In this week’s Women’s Western, the tests kept coming. Wenzler opened with rounds of 67-69 to win stroke-play medalist honors. The No. 1 seed on the bracket comes with a pressure all its own.
“You could be the one seed, you could be the 32 seed, it doesn’t matter in a tournament like this because all these girls here are amazing.”
⛳ 1st in stroke play 🏅 🆚 def. Sarah Arnold 5&4 🆚 def. Mikayla Bardwell 3&2 🆚 def. Kan Bunabodee 1 up 🆚 def. Jennifer Cleary 2&1 🆚 def. Maddison Hinson-Tolchard 20 holes pic.twitter.com/v4BLN1KjJR
— Women's Western Golf Association (@WWGAGOLF) July 24, 2021
She cruised through four matches until drawing Hinson-Tolchard, who won the Women’s Southern Amateur in match play earlier this summer, in the final. Wenzler had Hinson-Tolchard 2 down through two holes, but she looked at Stoly and told him that meant nothing.
“We’re all square,” she said. “Pretend we’re all square.”
After an eagle at the par-5 15th, Wenzler was once again 2 up entering the last three holes and feeling good. But then she mis-hit a drive that got her in trouble. A 20-footer for birdie on No. 17 helped Hinson-Tolchard keep herself in the match and when both players parred 18, they went to extra holes. Wenzler won with a 4-foot putt for par on No. 2 when Hinson-Tolchard lipped out her par putt.
Marissa Wenzler on the final day at the Women’s Western Am at Park Ridge CC (Photo by Charles Cherney Photography)
Wenzler will take a break next week rather than defend her LNGA title. She’ll return to the U.S. Women’s Am in two weeks. In addition to making big gains in her game through last year’s play, a COVID summer also taught her to approach the game differently.
“I played (golf) for the love of it and that was all of last summer,” she said. “Fortunately, it led me to the Am which was amazing to be able to play in. That’s something I’ll never forget.”
Wenzler played her way into the Women’s Am through a one-day qualifier this time.
All week at the Western Am, Wenzler kept in touch with swing coach Kevin Jones – who also helps her keep her mental game in check. Jones’ cool, calm influence has been key in Wenzler’s success, but even Jones got keyed up the deeper Wenzler ventured into the Women’s Western bracket.
“The texts were like, ‘Awesome, good job, let’s get to work, let’s keep it going,’ and then today it was all like, ‘Let’s go!’”
Here’s everything you need to know – including a few more players to watch – for the 2020 U.S. Women’s Amateur.
Eleven months ago, Rachel Kuehn was riding the bench as the Wake Forest women’s golf team made its 2019-20 debut. The freshman from Asheville, North Carolina, didn’t qualify for the event.
“She came into my office and asked ‘What do I need to do, coach?’” said head coach Kim Lewellen. “I said, ‘You’ve got to make it where I can’t not take you.’”
Kuehn did just that, winning her college debut wire-to-wire at the 2019 ANNIKA Intercollegiate – arguably the most competitive regular-season tournament in women’s college golf – and has since made a name for herself as one of the nation’s best amateur players.
“It showed me I can compete on a national stage and that I can compete with the best players in the country. It was more of a confidence thing than anything,” said Kuehn of her debut victory. “Now that I’ve been able to put myself in that situation a couple times in the past year, it’s done wonders for my confidence and game.”
This week, just outside the Washington, D.C., she’ll have a chance to officially claim the title of nation’s best as Woodmont Country Club in Rockville, Maryland, plays host to the U.S. Women’s Amateur Aug. 3-9, with Kuehn and defending champion Gabi Ruffels highlighting the loaded field. Kuehn enters the week in impressive form, winning her last two events: the prestigious North & South Women’s Amateur at Pinehurst and the Ladies National Golf Association Amateur.
Kuehn’s pandemic-shortened freshman campaign featured the win at the ANNIKA and two more top-10s in just five events. She didn’t finish worse than 17th and led the Demon Deacons with a 71.23 scoring average.
“We have a really competitive team. Any five of us can travel on any day and we can have a chance to compete for a win,” said Kuehn. “So it’s definitely motivating to know I have to be able to go out there and play my best just to even qualify, let alone play well in the tournaments.”
On the bag this week will be her older brother, Corrie, who played golf at Rhodes College in Memphis and previously caddied for his sister at the U.S. Girls’ Junior three years ago.
“He keeps me really loose on the course,” said Rachel. “He keeps my mind off golf when I’m walking between shots and when I get to my ball he’s like, ‘Alright time to buckle down and focus.’ And he is really good at helping that transition and keeping me loose and not so nervous.”
“Goofy 1 and Goofy 2 when they’re together,” chimed in their mother, Brenda, an All-American golfer and five-time winner as a senior for the Demon Deacons in the 1980s.
The Siblings Kuehn will have their work cut out for them this week. Here’s everything you need to know – including a few more players to watch – for the 2020 U.S. Women’s Amateur.
Marissa Wenzler is about to tee it up for the fourth consecutive week. The Kentucky sophomore’s past month was dotted with close calls and finally, at last week’s Ladies National Golf Association Amateur, a breakthrough.
It all started with the North & South Women’s Amateur at Pinehurst. Wenzler played all the way to the Round of 16. It was the same story the next week at the Women’s Western Amateur.
There was extra incentive to make a deep run at those events this year, considering the USGA reserved spots in the Women’s Amateur for the top two finishers. By the time the LNGA Amateur rolled around, she had forgotten that exemption even existed. A friend reminded her by text.
“You might be in it,” she said, “you might be in contention.”
Indeed, Wenzler rose from outside the top 10 after 36 holes to a tie for second, earning one of the final two spots in the championship along with Kennedy Pedigo.
In her freshman season at Kentucky, Wenzler had three top-20 finishes in six starts. The Wildcats won two of their first three events. I
Wenzler attributes part of her recent success, however, to the late-spring quarantine period that followed. Among other things, older brother Ryan Wenzler – who has played on the Mackenzie and Latinoamerica tours – gave her a putting tip that helped her putt more freely. Ryan will be on the bag for her at Woodmont.
The recent success is more mental than physical, Marissa Wenzler says, but the physical counts for something too.
“I already kind of know what the ball is doing,” she said. “I know what needed work, I know what’s going well. That’s been a huge advantage. I feel like the more I play, the better I get.”
U.S. captain Ellen Port with Mariah Stackhouse (right) and Emma Talley during the morning four-ball match of the 2014 Curtis Cup.
A legend returns
A USGA amateur championship field can be sorted in many ways. Ellen Port’s name falls into a number of categories: oldest competitors, Curtis Cup participants (or in her case, captain), most U.S. Women’s Amateur appearances and perhaps most impressively, past USGA champions. Port has won seven of these things – three U.S. Senior Women’s Amateurs and four U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateurs and she keeps showing up.
Port, who captained the U.S. Curtis Cup team to victory in her native St. Louis in 2014, earned an exemption into this week’s U.S. Women’s Amateur courtesy of her 2016 U.S. Women’s Senior Amateur win. It will be her 23rd start in the event, and while that sounds like record-breaking stuff, the 58-year-old would have a long way to go to catch legends like Carole Semple Thompson with 41 appearances and Anne Sandor with 37.
But Port’s name is worth watching because she very likely could make it past the stroke-play threshold on Tuesday and show up on the match-play bracket. She did in 2018 at the Golf Club of Tennessee, becoming the oldest player to make match play at the Women’s Amateur since Sandor did it in 1994. Port was only 22 days younger than Sandor was when she made the bracket.
She lost in the first round that year to Dylan Kim.
The average age of the field at Woodmont Country Club is 20.5 years old. Port is one of two players, along with four-time U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur champion Meghan Stasi, over 40.
Gabriela Ruffels with her caddie, Justin Silverstein, during the final round at the 2019 U.S. Women’s Amateur. (Photo: USGA/Steven Gibbons)
The field
In total, there are 132 players in this year’s field.
Average age: 20.5
States represented: 30
California (19), Texas (14), Florida (8) and North Carolina (7) lead the way.
Countries represented: 20
Unites States (92); Spain (4); Canada, Paraguay and Thailand (3); Australia, Columbia, Denmark, Germany, Guatemala, Mexico, People’s Republic of China and South Africa (2); Argentina, Finland, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Norway and the Philippines each have one.
Top 50 players in the World Amateur Golf Ranking: 20
Emilia Migliaccio (3), Rose Zhang (8), Gabriela Ruffels (9), Kaitlyn Papp (12), Sofia Garcia (15), Auston Kim (20), Siyun Liu (22), Kiira Riihijarvi (23), Allisen Corpuz (24), Alexa Pano (27), Pimnipa Panthong (28), Megan Schofill (29), Lei Ye (30), Gina Kim (33), Alyaa Abdulghany (34), Aneka Seumanutafa (35), Amanda Sambach (45), Carla Tejedo (47), Kaleigh Telfer (48), Lauren Hartlage (49).
Colleges with most active players: Duke (6); USC (6); Stanford (5); Arkansas and Wake Forest (4); Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Michigan State and Texas (3).
