Tag: Pfau Course

Nick Piesen’s competitive debut at the Pfau Course results in Hoosier Am title

“It’s not easy to hold on to a lead but I’m really happy that I did.”

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The Pfau Course isn’t home yet, but it will be soon for Nick Piesen. Once he moves onto the Indiana campus, he’ll get plenty more reps at the Hoosier’s home golf course. Based on his first chapter at the Pfau, the rest of the story looks promising.

Piesen, an incoming Indiana freshman from Strongsville, Ohio, ran away with the Hoosier Amateur title on Thursday. He was the only player in the 84-man field to finish three rounds under par.

Piesen had only played the Pfau Course once last summer on a trip to the Indiana campus in Bloomington, and simply intended to get some reps, hit some shots and learn the course at this week’s tournament. He came out of the gate with a 3-under 68 and built a two-shot lead.

“I felt good, it was really nice to shoot that right away,” he said. “I just felt like I could play that course and I just felt really confident in my game. It’s not easy to hold on to a lead but I’m really happy that I did.”

Piesen opened the second round with four birdies in his first nine holes. A rain delay forced the continuation of that round the next morning, with the final round to follow.

“Those four birdies I had on the front,” Piesen said. “I made putt after putt.”

Piesen capped off a second-round 67 and then brought in a 1-over 73 to finish at 5 under, six shots ahead of runner-up Carter Smith, who plays for Ball State. Smith has been on a tear since the spring, having won the Don Benbow Invitational for his first collegiate title before playing the National Golf Invitational with his team. He was eighth at the Indiana Amateur at the Pfau Course, a quarterfinalist at the IGA Match Play and third in the Indiana Open.

Carsen Silliman, who plays for Southern Illinois-Carbondale, and Noah Gillard, another Indiana player, tied for third at 3 over.

Piesen’s tournament total of 5 under is the lowest in the four-year history of the Hoosier Amateur, and matches the winning score from the Indiana-hosted Hoosier Collegiate Invitational last fall. Last month, when the Pfau Course hosted the Indiana State Amateur, the winning score was 2 under for 54 holes.

Piesen credits his scoring with having turned a corner on the greens after a recent conversation with his dad. Roughly a week before the Hoosier Amateur, Piesen, a self-described feel putter, started lining up the golf ball on the greens.

“It’s changed my whole putting perspective,” he said.

Asked where he thought teeth came out at the Pfau Course, Piesen immediately referenced the greens. Still, he had 28 putts in the first round and 27 the next round.

“I putted really well this week but off the tee, I hit a fade and I think it’s a fader’s golf course and I really liked how that felt,” he said. “About every hole I felt really comfortable.

“My short game was really spot-on this week.”

The Hoosier Amateur is Piesen’s first tournament win since claiming the AJGA Lanto Junior Championship in June. It marks a major transition from junior golf to college golf. Piesen spotted Indiana coach Mike Mayer in his gallery throughout the week and appreciated that his future teammates were watching as he finished up.

Piesen, a Hoosier commit since 2021, expects Indiana to set him up nicely for whatever the future in golf holds for him.

“The golf course speaks for itself,” he said. “It’s such a hard course and I loved everything about it. It’s going to make me better. It will make me hit different shots, just make me a better player.”

College-heavy field ready for Pfau Course at fourth annual Hoosier Amateur

The Golfweek Hoosier Amateur is a 54-hole event ranked in the World Amateur Golf Ranking.

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The summer tournament gauntlet is spiraling toward completion – and, for some, the start of the fall college season. The Golfweek Hoosier Amateur offers a Midwest tune-up for a college-heavy field with roughly a month until college competition gets underway.

The Golfweek Hoosier Amateur debuted in the fall of 2020, when many players – collegians among them – were searching for a place to play as the pandemic upended the normal spring, summer and fall competition calendars. The Pfau Course, a Steve Smyers-designed layout on the campus of Indiana University, opened in June of that year. Players raved about the difficulty – and the greens.

Erica Shepherd, now a rookie on the Epson Tour, won the women’s division at the inaugural tournament after going 2 over for 54 holes. The men’s title went to Tommy Kuhl, then an Illinois junior who recently made headlines when he fired a course-record 62 on aerated greens in a U.S. Open local qualifier, only to later DQ himself when he realized he had violated the Rules of Golf by repairing multiple aeration marks during the round.

The next two titles went to Eleanor Hudepohl and Siarra Stout, respectively, on the women’s side with Taichi Kho and Nels Surtani claiming victory on the men’s side.

This year’s field includes more than 100 amateurs, with college players amounting for the biggest chunk of that. None of the event’s past champions return this year.

The field does include a handful of local players, including a pair of incoming Indiana women’s players and six members of the Hoosier men’s team. Several more players from Power 5 conferences will tee it up, including those from Michigan, Purdue, Oregon, Georgia, Ohio State, Kansas and Michigan State. The field also includes three players from Ball State, including Carter Smith, a member of the Cardinal team that finished fourth at the National Golf Invitational in May. Ball State commit Happy Gilmore, who plays locally for Bloomington High School South, is also in the field.

As the Golfweek Hoosier Amateur has built into an annual late-summer event, the Pfau Course has risen in national prominence. It’s tied with French Lick Resort’s Ross course for second place on the Golfweek’s Best List of best public-access courses you can play in Indiana.

In June of this year, the Pfau Course hosted the Indiana State Amateur, marking the first time in the event’s 123-year history that it was played in Bloomington. The Pfau Course has also hosted Golfweek Junior Tour and Golfweek Amateur Tour events, as well as the LPGA Amateur Tour Championship.

Director of Golf Daniel Hilker noted that if the weather allows for course conditions to be firm and fast, players will be tested in all areas of their game.

“The course is showing its teeth this time of year,” Hilker said. “Expect the leaders to be at the top of the field in driving accuracy, scrambling, and putting.”

The Golfweek Hoosier Amateur is a 54-hole event, ranked in the World Amateur Golf Ranking, that will be played Aug. 8-10.

Siarra Stout wins 2022 Golfweek Hoosier Amateur, sets big goals for final year of college

“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.

“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.

“So who knows where I’ll end up after this year.”

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At Golfweek Hoosier Amateur, Indiana’s Pfau Course plays tough as billed

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.

Golfweek Hooser Amateur Scores: Men | Women

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
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.

More: Pfau Course a silver lining for Hoosiers without fall play

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
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.”

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