Jensen Castle to Play for U.S. Women’s Amateur Championship
RYE, N.Y. – Kentucky women’s golfer Jensen Castle will play for the U.S. Women’s Amateur national championship on Sunday.
She got there Saturday in steely fashion.
Playing against the nation’s undisputed top player in the country during the 2020-21 collegiate season, Castle rallied from 2 down with three holes to play to beat Stanford’s Rachel Heck – the 2021 NCAA individual champion – on the 19th hole of the semifinals.
Castle advanced to Sunday’s championship match and will play Arizona’s Vivian Hou in a 36-hole marathon to determine the nation’s top amateur of the year. Hou won her semifinals match 2 up vs. Michigan State’s Valentina Ross.
The championship will begin at 8 a.m. at the Westchester Country Club’s West Course (par 72, 6,488 yards) in Rye, New York. The Golf Channel will pick up with live coverage at 2 p.m.
Castle advanced by winning three of the final four holes Saturday and didn’t card a single bogey to knock off the 2021 PING Women’s Golf Coaches Association Player of the Year, the ANNIKA Award winner, the Honda Sports Award for golf winner and Pac-12 Golfer of the Year.
“That was one of the best matches I think I’ve ever played or seen,” Castle told the Golf Channel after the match. “Five or six birdies and there were only two holes that par won. I mean, that’s awesome match play.”
Awesome may be an understatement.
Heck took a 2-up lead on the 15th hole when a chip that was going to run considerably past the hole hit the pin and bounced in for a birdie. That put Castle’s back against the wall.
On the next hole, Castle parred the par-3 16th and Heck bogeyed, the first blemish by either player all round. The two matched each other with pars on the 17th hole, setting up a win-or-go-home scenario for Castle on the par-5 18th.
Both Castle and Heck had to lay up and gave themselves a chance for birdie after their approach shots on 18. Castle just barely missed her birdie attempt from about 12 feet, but Heck rolled her first putt four feet past and then surprisingly missed the four-foot comeback for par on the inside. Heck conceded Castle’s tap-in to set up the sudden-death playoff.
“Last hole I was really hoping I could make that birdie because I thought for sure she was going to make that,” Castle said. “When she missed, I was completely shocked.”
The par-4 10th hole would serve as the first playoff hole, which Castle birdied and won earlier in the match. Castle nearly drove the 274-yard hole but wasn’t satisfied with her chip shot, leaving it about 20 feet short of the hole and outside Heck’s putt.
Again, Castle never wavered. The 2021 U.S. Women’s Open qualifier calmly stepped up to the putt and sunk it for birdie, putting all the pressure on Heck to make her putt. From just inside 15 feet, Heck’s attempt looked good but lipped out for a stunning ending.
Down went the nation’s consensus national collegiate player of the year and on to Sunday went Castle. The junior-to-be never led until winning the match and twice rallied from a two-hole deficit.
“That’s the first time I was really even,” Castle said of her mindset going into the playoff hole. “I was even on the first hole and then I lost it, so that’s the first opportunity that I had was this coming hole so I was like, I’m going to take a chance. I knew the wind was the same direction as earlier and I knew that I birdied it earlier, so I had that confidence going into it. I just played the wind and hit a great drive. The chip was not that good, but I knew all day that none of my putts fell. I had a ton of great putts and my mental mindset was that everything equals out. Some putts will drop, some won’t. Everything happens for a reason. I knew as soon as I got up there that was the perfect line.”
Castle is the first Kentucky women’s golfer in program history to advance to the championship match of the U.S. Women’s Amateur.
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 rolled 4 and 2 Thursday afternoon and 6 and 5 in the quarterfinals.
But Saturday’s effort was her finest yet and matches her up with another formidable opponent, Hou, the 2020 WGCA Freshman of the Year two seasons ago.
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 won’t be too bright on Sunday 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.
