Women's Golf
(opens in a new tab)
Jensen Castle Advances to U.S. Women’s Amateur Semifinals

Jensen Castle Advances to U.S. Women’s Amateur Semifinals

by Eric Lindsey

RYE, N.Y. – Kentucky women’s golfer Jensen Castle is two wins away from a U.S. Women’s Amateur championship.
 
Castle won her fourth straight match with a 6-and-5 victory on Friday vs. Virginia Tech’s Emily Mahar to cruise into the semifinals of the nation’s premier amateur tournament.
 
The junior-to-be took a commanding 5-up lead through eight holes and slammed the door shut on the 13th hole to make it to the weekend at the Westchester Country Club’s West Course (par 72, 6,488 yards) in Rye, New York.
 
Now, Castle will have a showdown with last year’s top college golfer, Stanford’s Rachel Heck. As a freshman, Heck collected nearly every major national golf award, including winning the individual NCAA championship, PING Women’s Golf Coaches Association Player of the Year, the ANNIKA Award, the Honda Sports Award for golf and Pac-12 Golfer of the Year. Heck won her Friday match 3 and 2 vs. Kan Bunnabodee from Purdue.
 
The Castle-Heck match will tee off Saturday at 1:30 p.m. The GOLF Channel will have live coverage of the semifinals from 2-5 p.m.
 
The winner of the Castle-Heck match will face the winner of Yu-Chiang Hou vs. Valentina Rossi on Sunday in the 36-hole championship match to crown the country’s top amateur golfer of the year.
 
Castle won five of the opening six holes Friday to take a 4-up lead early in the match. She earned the advantage with three birdies in those first six holes.
 
In advancing to the weekend, Castle will try to become the first Kentucky women’s golfer to reach the U.S. Women’s Amateur finals. With only records of the finals available, she is believed to the be the first Wildcat to reach the semifinals of the national tournament.
 
For Castle, it’s been a satisfying week after battling through a tough summer. After helping her team to the NCAA Championship finals in May, the program’s first appearance since 1992, Castle appeared in the U.S. Women’s Open as an amateur, but a stress fracture she suffered in one of her ribs began to cause problems.
 
Castle played through the injury to win a second straight Carolinas Four-Ball Championship with Wake Forest’s Rachel Kuehn at the beginning of June, but the injury persisted and Castle had to withdraw from several summer tournaments. She wasn’t cleared to swing a club until early last week.
 
With no expectations heading into this week’s event given the lack of recent play, Castle has gotten better and better with each round. She opened the stroke-play portion of the tournament behind the proverbial eight ball with a 79 and needed to make a big comeback to even make match play.
 
Castle did just that in the second round with a 71 to join a 12-for-2 playoff. She and UK teammate Marissa Wenzler birdied the first hole of the playoff, and the momentum has rolled forward from there.
 
She knocked off the bracket’s No. 2 overall seed in the first round 3 and 2, won her round of 32 match 1 up, and then has rolled in the last two matches, 4 and 2 Thursday afternoon and 6 and 5 in the quarterfinals.  
 
Played annually and organized by the United States Golf Association, the U.S. Women’s Amateur has been played since 1895. There are no age restrictions, but to make the field is an achievement within itself with a record 1,560 entries and a maximum USGA Handicap Index of 5.4. A total of 25 sectional qualifiers were held in the U.S. and one in Canada.
 
Past notable champions include Julie Inkster (1980-82), Grace Park (1998), Morgan Pressel (2005), Danielle Kang (2010-11) and Kristen Gillman (2014, 2018).
 
This marks the second straight appearance for Castle, who made it to the round of 32 last season.
 
The stage shouldn’t be too bright for Castle, who came to Kentucky as the most decorated signee in program history. In addition to this season’s NCAA Championship experience, playing in the U.S. Women’s Open and winning back-to-back Carolinas Women’s Four-Ball Championship titles, she has played in national events such as the Girls Junior PGA Championship, the Rolex Girls Junior Championship, the Wyndham Cup and the ANNIKA Invitational.
 
At Kentucky, Castle has been as good as advertised with 17 appearances in two seasons, seven top-20 finishes and a 73.6 stroke average. She set the program’s single-season scoring record in 2019-20 with 71.9 strokes per round.
 
Teammates Wenzler and Laney Frye also participated in this week’s event in New York.
 
Wenzler fell in Thursday morning’s round of 32 to end a marvelous two weeks for the junior-to-be. She won both the stroke-play and match-play portions of the Western Women’s Amateur to finish July and then knocked off Kuehn in this week’s event, the top seed in match play.
 
Frye, an All-Southeastern Conference performer as a freshman this past season, advanced to match play but lost in the first round.
 
UK’s three representatives to start the tournament tied for the second most in the field. Only Stanford, with four players, featured more players to start the event.
 
Kentucky’s 2021-22 schedule was released last month. Returning all five players who qualified and played in the NCAA Championship Finals, the Wildcats will play in nine regular-season events before the SEC Championship and postseason play. After navigating through the COVID-19 pandemic, UK will return to a traditional schedule with four tournaments in the fall, four in the spring, a head-to-head matchup with rival Louisville and then the postseason.
 
For the latest on the Kentucky women’s golf team, follow the team on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, as well as on the web at UKathletics.com.
 

Related Stories

View all
some text
Kentucky Women’s Golf Adds Maggie Carlson
some text
UK Concludes Fall Season in Sixth Place out of 11 Teams at the Charles Schwab
some text
Three Players in the Top 11 at the Charles Schwab Women’s Collegiate Invitational