The defending champion is out of this U.S. Women’s Amateur.
Auburn grad Megan Schofill, last year’s champion at Bel-Air Country Club, led 2 up with six holes to play Wednesday at Southern Hills in Tulsa, Oklahoma. But Princeton’s Catherine Rao won each of the next four holes, going eagle-birdie-birdie-birdie to flip the match on Schofill and advance to Thursday’s Round of 32 with a 2-and-1 victory.
“It does make it a little bit sweeter,” Rao said of knocking off the defending champ, “but at the end of the day I’m out here, and I think the biggest thing that I’ve learned in playing U.S. Amateur is I’m out here to play golf and I’m competing against myself more than anyone else. I’m just doing my thing, stay calm, and trying to take the pressure off. To me it doesn’t really matter whether I’m playing against the past champion or someone that I don’t even know.”
She’ll face another college grad in former LSU standout Latanna Stone in the second round.
Rao was the Ivy League rookie of the year as a freshman and advanced to the quarterfinals of last summer’s Women’s British Amateur and U.S. Women’s Amateur, but she missed her entire sophomore season because of injury. Earlier this summer, she again made match play at the Women’s British Amateur, losing in the Round of 16.
Fourteen of the top 20 in the Women’s World Amateur Golf Ranking, which was updated Wednesday morning, teed it up this week, and all 14 made match play. Those same players went 8-6 on Wednesday, though three of the top 7 – UCLA’s Zoe Campos, USC’s Catherine Park and incoming Stanford freshman Andrea Revuelta – were eliminated. Campos led USC’s Bailey Shoemaker, the most recent runner-up at the Augusta National Women’s Amateur, 2 up through 11 holes before losing, 1 down, as Shoemaker took the last hole with a bogey.
Shoemaker was the only player to get through both a 20-for-10 playoff, which went just two holes Wednesday morning, and her opening match.
“It doesn’t even feel like it was today,” Shoemaker said of the playoff. “That was crazy. It’s my first ever USGA playoff. Obviously I was disappointed to even be in it, but it was a grind. I knew that if I just make the par game like we do at school, just whoever makes the most pars will win.”
Stanford, the reigning NCAA team champion and unquestioned No. 1 entering this fall, has just one player still in this championship (Kelly Xu) after sophomore Paula Martin Sampedro also bowed out on Wednesday. Texas has the most players remaining with four – Farah O’Keefe, Lauren Kim, Angelo Heo and Cindy Hsu.
World No. 5 Jasmine Koo, an incoming freshman at USC, is the highest-ranked player remaining after she topped Texas’ Selena Liao, 2 up. Wake Forest grad Rachel Kuehn (8), Texas A&M’s reigning NCAA individual champ Adela Cernousek (9) and recent U.S. Girls’ Junior winner Rianne Malixi (10) were the other top-10 players to advance to the Round of 32. Kuehn, who is set to turn pro later this year, scored the most convincing win, a 7-and-5 rout of Palmer Cupper Mary Kelly Mulcahy, who went undefeated in the international competition last month. Kuehn’s next opponent: Arkansas sophomore Maria Jose Marin, the top seed as the stroke-play medalist, who beat Leigha Devine, 6 and 5.