The sparkling smile on Gerina Piller’s face following her 2-under 70 on Friday rivaled the shimmer from the glittery threads sewn into her black pullover. After sitting out the entire 2018 season on maternity leave with her son A.J. and then the stops and starts of the 2020 season, Piller is finally getting to a place of serenity with her game.
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An amateur nearly won on the Symetra Tour on Sunday. Ruixin Liu, however, wasn’t going to let that happen.
It took two extra holes at Longbow Golf Club in Mesa, Arizona, for the Carlisle Arizona Women’s Golf Classic to reach a conclusion, but when Liu made a birdie on her third trip down No. 18 for the day, she effectively wrapped up her fifth career Symetra Tour title and forced Zhang to wait a little longer for her first win on the pro circuit.
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When Stacy Lewis won the 2020 Aberdeen Standard Investments Ladies Scottish Open, her first call was to husband Gerrod Chadwell and their daughter Chesnee back home in Texas. With a beaming smile on her face, Lewis got to tell her little girl those words every kid loves to hear – “We’re going to Disney World!”
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LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. – Gaby Lopez is looking forward to the Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo. And with good reason.
Lopez told GolfChannel.com on Tuesday that following her victory at the 2020 Diamond Resorts Tournament of Champions, where she is defending her title this week, she was approached by Carlos Padilla Becerra, the president of the Mexican Olympic Committee. Lopez says he offered her the opportunity to carry the flag for Mexico during the opening ceremony in Japan.
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LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. – Brittany Lincicome sent a subtle signal on Tuesday as she began her 17th season on the LPGA Tour. She walked to the media center dressed head to toe in black, a departure for a player who has won eight times in a palette of pastel blues and pinks.
“I’m intimidating,” Lincicome joked about her dark ensemble, provided by her new clothing sponsor, Abacus Sportswear. She laughed about the color change, but the veteran was all business when it came to getting back to work at the 2021 season opener, the Diamond Resorts Tournament of Champions.
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DURHAM, N.C.— Duke University women's golf 2020 graduate Ana Belac made a splash on the Symetra Tour, after concluding her Blue Devil career this past spring.
A native of Portoroz, Slovenia, Belac registered six top-20 results across nine starts on the Symetra Tour, including her first professional win at the Carolina Golf Classic. She earned $49,081 on her way to receiving her 2021 LPGA Tour card and Symetra Tour Player of the Year accolades.
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A Kentucky native playing on the LPGA Tour has joined with two organizations to promote girls golf in her home state.
Emma Talley, a native of Princeton, Ky., will become a Tradition Ambassador to the Kentucky PGA Junior Tour and the Peggy Kirk Bell Girls Golf Tour (PKBGT) in 2021. The PKBGT season-opening event will bear her name — the two-day Emma Talley Girls Tradition — will be April 17-18, 2021 at Bowling Green Country Club. That is where Talley won three Kentucky state high school championships while playing for Caldwell County High School.
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HOUSTON — Megan Khang enters this weekend at the U.S. Women’s Open in a tie for third and just four strokes off the lead of Japan’s Hinako Shibuno. A victory would be the first of her career after she turned pro five years ago.
That’s hardly the most incredible part of her story.
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The Atlanta Falcons have named defensive end Steven Means as their nominee for the NFL's Walter Payton Man of the Year Award.
Means first joined the Falcons in 2018; he has become an impactful player on the field, but that is far exceeded by his impact off of it. A leader on the team's Social Justice Committee, Means was instrumental in the Falcons' initiative of educating local youth in the voting space.
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The theory is a sound one – Brittany Lang, who already has one U.S. Women’s Open title under her belt, was reared in Texas, the state where this year’s event will be held starting Thursday. She’s certain to have an edge in terms of familiarity, right?
Not necessarily.
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HOUSTON – Stacy Lewis is ecstatic about the opportunity to compete for a U.S. Women’s Open title in her own backyard.
She graduated from The Woodlands High School, which sits roughly 30 minutes from Champions Golf Club, the site of this week’s tournament. And she’s been a member at Champions, nestled in the northwest suburbs of Houston, for about four years.
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This year the Symetra Tour crowned its first champion from Slovenia, Ana Belac. Few on tour knew her name this spring. She did not start the season on the Road. In fact, she was gearing up for her senior year at Duke University to defend her teams 2019 NCAA Champion title before COVID-19 interfered. During quarantine Belac made the decision to turn professional and live a dream a younger version of herself barely knew existed. The entire country of Slovenia has only 13 golf courses for its 2.1 million people. That’s about the same population as suburban Charlotte, North Carolina where there are 50 golf courses and another 50 within an hour’s drive.
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About nine months ago, Stacy Lewis figured she had no chance to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics and earn the medal she missed by one bobbling putt in Rio.
“With where I was in the rankings, and tournaments were getting canceled, I just assumed there was no opportunity,” she said by phone Monday. “The Olympics really hadn’t been on my radar at all.”
Now, a return to the Olympics in 2021 is plausible. Strong play in her home state of Texas the next two weeks could vault Lewis into the top 15 in the world, a necessary floor to make the U.S. team come the June rankings cutoff.
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Athletes are creatures of habit. They typically thrive on routine and spend a great deal of time trying to perfect it.
Right now, Jaclyn Lee doesn’t have much of a routine. Most of her days are spent listening to the gentle crash of waves along the shoreline of Okanagan Lake in British Columbia. Lee, 23, is in the midst of a two-week quarantine after returning home from the LPGA Drive On Championship in Georgia. There’s no WiFi at the condo. No cable. Her dad gave her a few old movies to watch if she got bored, but she’s mostly using this time as a deep cleanse.
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American two-time major winner Brittany Lincicome says her "heart breaks" to not be playing at this year's Women's Open.
Lincicome, 34, has chosen not to play at the event at Royal Troon because of health and safety concerns amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The event, formerly known as the Women's British Open, will take place from 20-23 August.
"I'm so bummed, my heart breaks not to go," she told BBC World Service Sport.
"This is my 16th year I think on tour and I'm not sure I've ever missed the British Open which is a huge event, it's one that I never want to miss."
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Ana Belac makes the phrase “if you put your mind to it, anything is possible” come to life.
Growing up in Portoroz, Slovenia, a coastal town along the Adriatic Sea near the Gulf of Trieste, the closest golf course—Lipica Golf Club—was roughly a 45-minute drive away. The practice balls were cracked and yellowed, and course maintenance consisted of mowing the grass and little else. Nonetheless, Belac won her first event around age seven. She didn’t fall in love with the sport right away, though.
“I was the only junior at the golf club and I thought it was really boring because it was pretty much just a lot of older people,” said Belac. “I liked to ski at the time. I played tennis and was into track and field, all way more competitive and interesting to me as a kid. When I won, it gave me the motivation and showed me there was a real competitive side to golf.”
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Duke senior Ana Belac's NCAA career was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Ryan Lavner looks at her journey to turn professional sooner than planned.
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By Ana Belac
Our team was driving to a tournament in March when we heard the season was canceled and that college sports had been suspended because of the coronavirus. Two hours later, we heard the NCAA Championship was also canceled. It was difficult to process. In just a few hours, I went from being in a pre-tournament mind-set to having my senior year end. More than that, my final season with this team, representing the university I love, defending our NCAA title, was over. I became emotional thinking about it and everything I had accomplished.
I came to Duke from Slovenia, a country in central Europe, with only a duffel bag and my clubs. When the airline lost my duffel, an assistant coach gave me some team clothes from previous seasons, so I’d have something to wear. I didn’t see it as unusual until I saw freshmen showing up with truckloads of stuff. But it didn’t bother me. I told myself I could do this. I’d made it to campus, I had my clubs, and I could speak English. I was ready.
I started playing golf in Slovenia when I was 4 or 5. My first set was meant for a teenager. The 9-iron was as tall as me. My parents got me lessons at the closest course, a public nine-holer about 45 minutes from our house. That’s where I played growing up. It isn’t maintained like courses in the United States. The range balls were old and cracked. If you got a bad one, it’d go 100 yards with a driver. If you got a really bad one, it would break apart in the air. It didn’t matter. I won the first tournament I played, at age 7 or 8, and I was hooked.
As the spread of COVID-19 has brought collegiate golf seasons to an unanticipated end, Duke University senior, Ana Belac, signed with Sterling Sports Management and turned professional this week. With a T61 finish in Q-School, Belac secured full Symetra Tour status for the 2020 season, and will begin competing once the schedule resumes.
Belac, 23, was born in Kranj, Slovenia, where the closest golf course was over 45 minutes away and had only nine, unkempt holes. Despite the challenges, Belac went on to build an impressive junior golf resume with the Slovenian national team. After claiming her place as the top female junior golfer in the country and representing Slovenia in the 2014 Youth Olympic Games, Belac moved to the United States to begin her collegiate golf career at Duke University.
In 2019, Belac led her team to their seventh NCAA Championship in school history. She is also tied for Duke’s fourth-lowest scoring average of all time. Belac was named All-ACC and WGCA Honorable Mention All-American in 2018 and 2019, Golfweek Third-Team All-American in 2019, and preseason Golfweek Second Team All-American in 2020. She was a member of the International Palmer Cup Team in 2019, was presented with the 2020 All-American Strength and Conditioning Athletes of the Year award, and also appears on the ANNIKA Award Watchlist for 2020.
Belac’s talent, class and determination all make her an excellent addition to the Sterling family. Her persistence through obstacles is sure to contribute to her success on the professional Tours as she tees off on the Symetra Tour later this year.
On a normal Wednesday in March, Conrad Shindler would be preparing for a Korn Ferry Tour event.
These days, normal seems like a foreign concept.
The coronavirus outbreak has forced the cancellation and postponement of professional tournaments and major championships around the world. Six of the next eight Korn Ferry Tour events have been canceled, with two postponed to a later date.
So what was Shindler doing awake at 6 a.m. on an off day? He was working.
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