Rianne Malixi is two wins away from becoming just the second player in USGA history to win both the U.S. Women’s Amateur and U.S. Girls’ Junior in the same year.
Malixi, a 17-year-old Duke commit from the Philippines, downed fellow junior golfer Asterisk Talley, 8 and 7, in last month’s U.S. Girls’ Junior final. On Saturday, Malixi will square off in a semifinal match against Arkansas senior Kendall Todd at Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The first player to accomplish the impressive double was Eun-jeong Seong, who in 2016 beat Andrea Lee in the final of the U.S. Girls’ Junior at Ridgewood before topping Virginia Elena Carta in the championship match of the U.S. Women’s Amateur at Rolling Green.
Malixi, who is already ranked 10th in the World Amateur Golf Ranking, dispatched Princeton’s Catherine Rao, 2 and 1, in the quarterfinals; Rao was appearing in her third straight quarters at this championship.
“A really hard-fought match,” Malixi said. “Both of us, me and Catherine, didn’t have our A-games. I just happened to be a lot more patient than I usually am, so just stuck around there, kept on grinding, and just waited for putts to drop. They didn’t, but I was still grinding out.”
Malixi now faces Todd, who needed 20 holes to get by Stanford’s Kelly Xu.
In the other semifinal, it’s the 15-year-old Talley, who surely will crack the top 50 in WAGR after this week (she’s currently No. 51), versus another Arkansas standout in Maria Jose Marin, the stroke-play medalist who eliminated Anna Davis in a 21-hole thriller. Neither player got more than 1 up in that match, though Davis made two costly double bogeys to lose both the 18th and 21st holes.
“As I’ve said a million times, and I think I’m going to say it until the day I die, I never thought I was going to be a medalist and not even in the semifinals,” Marin said.
“But I’m super, super happy and super proud of myself.”