The match between Rachel Kuehn-Brooke Matthews featured 14 birdies, highlighting an entertaining Round of 32 at the U.S. Women’s Amateur.
ROCKVILLE, Md – Imagine making six birdies and losing a match.
Unfortunately for Arkansas’ Brooke Matthews, that was her reality on Friday at the U.S. Women’s Amateur. The rising junior lost a tough match to Wake Forest’s Rachel Kuehn 3-and-1. Kuehn, who entered this week at Woodmont Country Club just outside the nation’s capital on a two-event win streak, made eight birdies of her own to advance to the afternoon Round of 16.
If Kuehn and Matthews played a better-ball round, they would’ve been 11 under through 17 holes.
Is that any good?
Top-seeded Rachel Heck continued to cruise with a 4-and-3 victory over Cecilie Finne-Ipsen. Both made par on the opening two holes, but the rest of the match was all Heck. The incoming Stanford freshman won the third hole and held the lead for the rest of the match.
The day’s fourth match was the first to go to extra holes, with Auburn’s Kaleigh Telfer coming back from three down on the 14th hole to force a playoff against Virginia Tech’s Emily Mahar.
“Yeah, I didn’t start off too good. I wasn’t hitting the ball too great,” said Telfer after the match. “Emily played really well the first few holes, and I just said to my caddie that on hole 15 I’ve just got to win this hole and then I’ve got something to work with. I managed to win that hole with a par, and then it just boosted the confidence and I was able to come back and get it to all square on 18.”
How’s this for a playoff hole? Fourth match of the Round of 32 is in extra holes. This is the 20th hole, the par-3 2nd, playing 172 yards with the pin guarded by a bunker. Glad I don’t have to play it. pic.twitter.com/0r9Vm5Z8wg
Telfer, making her U.S. Women’s Amateur debut, won with a par on the 20th hole, the par-3 2nd. On the bag for the rest of her matches is teammate and fellow senior Mychael O’Berry, who lost yesterday in the Round of 64.
“It’s a lot easier having her on the bag. She can calm me down a bit and knows what it’s like out here,” said Telfer of her fellow senior. “Of course she knows everything about this course, she knows my game pretty well, so it helps a lot.”
The final match on the course featured defending champion Gabriella Ruffels in a tight contest with Lei Ye that went to the 18th green. Ruffels, a senior at USC, had two putts from outside 25 feet to win. She only needed one.
The Round of 16 began at 12:45 p.m. ET with the all-Stanford match of Heck vs. Rose Zhang (a 2021 commit). The Cardinal aren’t the only two with a pair of players left. Auburn (Megan Schofill, Telfer), USC (Ruffels and Alyaa Abdulghany) and Wake Forest (Kuehn and Emilia Migliaccio) each have two players left in the field.
You can watch live action on Golf Channel from 1-4 p.m. ET.
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).
Rachel Kuehn played her way through two rounds of stroke play and five rounds of match play at Pinehurst over a brutally hot week.
Rachel Kuehn recently took up running. Without much else to do this spring, she started logging miles. The 19-year-old, who just completed her first season on the Wake Forest women’s golf team, took to her new hobby so quickly, in fact, that she recently mapped out a half-marathon course around her Asheville, North Carolina, neighborhood and completed the makeshift race herself.
“To be honest with you, I actually am not that tired,” Kuehn said Saturday at the end of one last double-round day at the North & South Women’s Amateur.
Kuehn played her way through two rounds of stroke play and five rounds of match play at Pinehurst over a brutally steamy week. The physical endurance gave her a welcome edge. Now that she’s a runner, Kuehn doesn’t notice the fatigue as much on the course.
“It’s a marathon, you’re playing 36 holes at Pinehurst,” she said.
Kuehn didn’t hesitate to call a Round of 16 showdown with Rachel Heck, a player who has made the cut in two LPGA majors her toughest test of the week. Heck has plenty of pedigree, and as Kuehn said, “she’s just as good a competitor as her resume shows she is.
Kuehn birdied three of her last four to force play holes and win in 20 holes.
“I was really excited to be able to finish that way,” she said. “I’ve been in that position before and didn’t have the same result. It’s something that I can carry with me next time I’m in a similar position.”
On Saturday, Kuehn met Michigan State’s Haylin Harris on an early morning. Both gave a hole away here or there, but ultimately Kuehn needed just 16 holes to advance and meet Allisen Corpuz in the afternoon final.
Against Corpuz, Kuehn got up early but they went back and forth from there. The two were called off the course to sit out a storm before they hit the 12th tee, and when they returned, Kuehn pretended she was facing a miniature six-hole match. She wiped the slate clean in her mind.
“The momentum wasn’t in my favor so it gave me a chance to reset,” Kuehn said of having just lost Nos. 10 and 11.
Corpuz squared the match with a par on No. 17 as Kuehn made bogey, but ultimately Kuehn ended it with a par on the first extra hole.
After coming into No. 18 tied, Allisen Corpuz and Rachel Kuehn will head to the 19th hole (No. 1) for the 118th Women's North & South Amateur Championship 🏆 pic.twitter.com/lOTc2VKK0D
“The history at that golf course and at that tournament is rich to say the least,” she said. “You walk down that hallway at Pinehurst that has all the names. To know that my name is going to go up there with all of those players … is something that is so cool to me.”
All week long, Kuehn had a veteran voice in her ear in local caddie Keith Silva. A family friend connected the two. Silva’s legend has grown the past year as the man on Will Holcomb V’s bag. The Sam Houston State player advanced all the way to the semifinals at the U.S. Amateur at Pinehurst last August, and was runner-up at the North & South Amateur earlier this month.
Kuehn is quite certainly more reserved in competition than Holcomb, who audibly jawed – good-naturedly – with Silva on the course.
“I would not have anything near the result I had without him,” she said matter-of-factly. “We work really well together and he knows that course like the back of his hand.
It got to the point where if the two disagreed on a line or shot, Kuehn deferred to Silva.
“That’s saying a lot because I’m a pretty stubborn person,” she said.
Rachel Kuehn walks with veteran Pinehurst caddie Keith Silva. (Hailie Sandor)
Kuehn carted home various momentos from Pinehurst this week. Each time a player makes a 2 on Pinehurst No. 2 – which Kuehn played six times in competition plus a practice round – the resort acknowledges it with a coin. Kuehn earned her first in the practice round and another in stroke play. Her mom suggested she try to win one more so that she could give one to each of her brothers and still have one for herself.
One of Rachel Kuehn’s “2 on 2” coins.
She ended up pocketing six.
Pinehurst awards a Putter Boy trophy to the champions of all it’s North & South tournaments. Runners-up take home a smaller one.
Rachel’s mom Brenda Corrie-Kuehn, who played the 2001 U.S. Women’s Open at nearby Pine Needles when she was 8 months pregnant with Rachel, was runner-up at the 1995 North & South Women’s Amateur. Her trophy lives in the Kuehn family den.
“Why don’t you go get a bigger one now,” Brenda joked with her daughter. The two remain competitive when it comes to sports.
It’s time for the Kuehn family to clear a space for a new piece of hardware, keeping in mind it’s probably not going to be the last time the display shelf gets reorganized.
