If a study in the top junior golf moments of the past 10 years proves anything, it’s that kids grow up fast. When the decade began, PGA Tour phenoms Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas were still teenagers, tearing up the junior golf circuit. The decade will close with them owning a combined four majors.
The top moments in junior golf focus on major scoring feats and new opportunities that elevated the junior game. It also shows junior golf success is a major indicator of what’s to come.
10. Birdies are everywhere at the 2019 Junior PGA Championship
It felt like one 59 watch right after another at the Keney Park Golf Course in Hartford, Connecticut, this summer. You have to scroll four players down the leaderboard to find a number in the 70s. Birdies and eagles were dropping left and right, and there were three aces throughout the course of the 72-hole event.
Jake Beber-Frankel had a 10-under 60 in the second round, a day after Canon Claycomb has opened with 62. But neither of those men (who finished fifth and second, respectively) could keep up with Jack Heath, who went 21 under and produced a final-round 62 for a one-shot win. It would be hard to select a definitive “best round” from that event, but Heath’s was pretty impressive. He sunk a 40-foot birdie from the fringe to seal it.
“I knew if it went in, I would most likely win, and it went in,” Heath told the PGA of America. “It’s why I play golf.”
9. Yealimi Noh wins 2018 U.S. Girls’ Junior title in a marathon
Here’s a moment that also made our decade list in amateur golf. Yealimi Noh’s U.S. Girls’ Junior-winning marathon from 2018 is that notable.
The championship schedule was repeatedly thrown off by a marine layer that crept over Poppy Hills Golf Course in Pebble Beach, California, and backed one round right into the next one (nearly 16 hours of delays in all). A hazy, er, crazy week ended when Noh defeated Alexa Pano in 33 holes of the scheduled 36-hole final. But here’s the catch: Noh had also completed the final 16 holes of her semifinal match that morning, which made her championship run a 49-hole day. It is believed to be the most holes of golf ever played on the final day of a USGA championship dating to 1895, the year the USGA began conducting national championships.
8. Don’t challenge Brad Dalke to an arm-wrestling match
Brad Dalke is one of those kids who made a major transformation throughout the course of the past decade. In 2010, he was a 13-year-old firmly committed to play college golf for Oklahoma (and had been committed for a year already). By 2017, he was holing the winning putt in the Sooners’ NCAA title run.
But in 2015, Dalke was the high school senior who defeated Rory McIlroy in an arm-wrestling match staged at the annual “Nike Night” during the Junior Invitational at Sage Valley.
“I took all my anger out from my 85 (on Thursday),” Dalke joked with Golfweek that day. “Working out and having good linebacker genetics is the secret. .. But he was a great guy. Pretty cool way to end my career at Sage Valley.”
Two years later, when Dalke qualified for the Masters courtesy of his runner-up finish at the U.S. Amateur, McIlroy declined a rematch, saying he didn’t want to “embarrass himself.”
7. Juniors get a pass to the U.S. Open, U.S. Women’s Open
It’s not all that unusual for an amateur to play a major championship – six play the Masters each year and a handful usually make it through sectional qualifying for the U.S. Open. A junior golfer is not often among that group, however.
The USGA created an avenue to the U.S. Open for at least one junior each year when it announced in 2017 that the winner of the U.S. Junior would be exempt into the following year’s U.S. Open. The winner of the U.S. Girls’ Junior would also be exempt into the U.S. Women’s Open. (It’s less unusual to see an amateur on this stage, however, considering that women’s golf skews much younger.)
Noah Goodwin and Erica Shepherd were the first two players to reap the benefits of the exemption in the summer of 2018, but Michael Thorbjornsen really made the most of it in 2019 when the 17-year-old made the cut at Pebble Beach. He was one of only four amateurs to play the weekend.
6. Alexa Pano nearly wins on the Symetra Tour
The Symetra Tour’s SKYiGOLF Championship was new to the schedule in 2019. The best publicity it could have gotten came in the form of Alexa Pano, a South Florida native.
Pano is the rare 15-year-old who can jump from junior golf one week to professional golf the next. Case in point, Pano won the Dustin Johnson World Junior Championship the week before her Symetra start.
Pano was just 14 in March when she played her way into the final group on the final day of the tournament at Charlotte Harbor National Golf Club in North Port, Florida, and was aiming to become the tour’s youngest winner. It was an historic week even though she ultimately finished five shots behind winner Alana Uriell.
A month later, she teed it up in the Augusta National Women’s Amateur, where she was the youngest player in the field.
5. Two close calls and a dose of honesty for Davis Riley
Davis Riley, who turned professional last year halfway through his senior year at Alabama, has the dubious honor of being the only player to finish runner-up at the U.S. Junior two times. They were close matches in 2013 and 2014, and the way Riley lost the former says a lot about the kid from Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
Riley ultimately fell to Scottie Scheffler in 2013 at Martis Camp in Truckee, California, when he addressed his golf ball – which was sitting next to a sprinkler head – and watched it move. He called a penalty on himself there, the 34th hole of the match, and ultimately made bogey while Scheffler made par to win.
“It is what it is,” he told Golfweek. “I thought it was a pretty decent lie, so I just stuck with it.”
The next year, he lost to Will Zalatoris, 5 and 3. Despite coming up short both times, Riley is still among a select group of player to appear in two U.S. Junior finals.
4. Akshay Bhatia tries to fast-track it from junior golf to PGA Tour
Few 17-year-olds can declare plans to skip college and instead turn professional and have that statement taken seriously. Akshay Bhatia is in that small category of individuals.
Bhatia had a level of talent and dedication that allowed him to fast-track his way to the PGA Tour. He turned professional in September – days after his turn as the youngest member of a U.S. Walker Cup team in history – but has yet to make a cut in a PGA Tour event as a professional.
Bhatia put together an all-time summer of golf in 218, winning four major junior events (Junior Invitational at Sage Valley, Polo Golf Junior Classic, Junior PGA Championship, Rolex Tournament of Champions) and finishing runner-up in five more (including the U.S. Junior). Throughout that process, he also continually played Monday qualifiers for Korn Ferry Tour and PGA Tour events. It taught him to make birdies in droves.
Bhatia certainly relished his days on the junior circuit and grew from them.
“It does push you to play good golf,” he said. “You can’t come out playing sloppy to win.”
3. Lucy Li charms at U.S. Women’s Open
We won’t soon forget the image of an 11-year-old Lucy Li licking an ice cream cone while being interviewed at the 2014 U.S. Women’s Open at Pinehurst No. 2. Li arrived that week wearing hand-made shirts that were torn and beaded at the bottom and pigtails. She logged back-to-back rounds of 78 and missed the cut.
Li was perhaps the picture of junior golf this decade. She was the latest phenom in a women’s game that continually skews younger. She first competed in a USGA event, the 2013 U.S. Women’s Amateur Public Links, at 10 years, 8 months, 16 days old. At the U.S. Women’s Amateur later that summer, Li garnered even more attention for a mature-beyond-her-years swing. She was watching Disney shows and reading comic books in between rounds.
In the following years, Li appeared everywhere from AJGA events to Junior Ryder Cup and Junior Solheim Cup teams, and eventually a U.S. Curtis Cup team. She turned professional last month.
2. Erica Shepherd keeps her head up in gimme-gate Twitter storm
Erica Shepherd drew a mob of angry Twitter-fire after the semifinals of the 2017 U.S. Girls’ Junior when opponent Elizabeth Moon raked back a short par putt that Shepherd had not yet conceded. Moon incurred a penalty that ultimately delivered a win for Shepherd.
Shepherd told rules officials she would have given Moon the putt had there been more time, but that didn’t seem to resonate on social media as critics viciously tore into Shepherd’s character.
In the wake of that firestorm, Shepherd managed to collect herself and come back to defeat Jennifer Chang in the next day’s scheduled 36-hole final. It easily goes down as the comeback of the decade in junior golf.
Shepherd later said that the whole experience was one that made her learn to be tougher in this game. The Greenwood, Indiana, native played the U.S. Girls’ Junior five times in the span of her career, and started her freshman season at Duke in the fall of 2019.
1. Jordan Spieth makes history as two-time U.S. Junior winner
When a 17-year-old Jordan Spieth claimed his second U.S. Junior title in 2011, he became just the second golfer in the history of the championship to accomplish that feat. Tiger Woods won three consecutive Junior Amateur titles from 1991 to 1993.
“Any time you can be compared to any of Tiger’s golf accomplishments, it’s very special,” Spieth told media at the time. “You know, he won it three years in a row. I’m glad to have gotten two of them, so now I can’t play in this one anymore, I’m going to go after the Amateurs that he won. But as of the present moment, I’m very happy to have won this coming in as a past champion and being able to make it through again.”
As it turns out, Spieth, who won his first U.S. Junior in 2009, never won a U.S. Amateur title. But his junior career, which ended that day at the Olympic Course at Golf Mountain Golf Club in Bremerton, Washington, laid a solid foundation for what has followed for Spieth as a professional. He has been a walking advertisement for the power of competitive junior golf, reaching the professional circuit with help from competitive experience he gained against his peers (notably Justin Thomas, Oliver Schniederjans and Patrick Rodgers).
