Five days and six rounds into the Maridoe Amateur, the quarterfinals are set. Half of the remaining field was seeded inside the top 10, and that includes Will Holcomb.
The Sam Houston State fifth-year senior is channeling some of his Pinehurst magic on this bracket. Twice in the past year and a half, Holcomb played his way deep into match play at that resort’s famed No. 2 course – at the 2019 U.S. Amateur (semifinals) and the 2020 North & South (finals).
On Friday at Maridoe Golf Club, Holcomb got past Coastal Carolina’s Zack Taylor in the morning but needed an extra hole to do it. He then defeated Oklahoma’s Logan McAllister by a 4-and-3 margin in the afternoon. It doesn’t get any easier from here. Holcomb will face Preston Summerhays, the 2019 U.S. Junior champion, in the quarterfinals. Summerhays also won the prestigious Sunnehanna Amateur over the summer.
Summerhays, a Class of 2021 player bound for Arizona State next fall, dispatched two college players in Oklahoma’s Patrick Welch and SMU’s McClure Meissner, the latter having the distinction of winning the Southern Amateur at Maridoe over the summer.
Down the bracket, No. 45 seed Benjamin Shipp, who won the South Beach International Amateur to end 2019 continues a gritty run that included victories over Santa Clara’s Matthew McCarty and SMU’s Noah Goodwin on Friday. Now he faces Christopher Gotterup, who had a similarly tough road. Gotterup, a Rutgers senior, barely got past stroke-play star Frankie Capan, of Florida Gulf Coast, on Friday afternoon.
Sam Choi, the New Mexico player, and Ryan Grider, a Baylor junior who won the 2019 Texas Amateur, will meet on the bottom of the bracket. The winner of that match will face the winner of a showdown between Luke Potter, a high school junior verbally committed to Arizona State, and Jonathan Brightwell, a fifth-year senior at Oklahoma who got past U.S. Amateur medalist Wilson Furr and Arizona State’s David Puig on Friday.
After a double-round day of matches on Saturday, two finalists will play a 36-hole final on Sunday to determine a champion.
