August 21, 2017
McNealy, Champ and Morikawa Tabbed for Walker Cup
Northern California will be well represented at next month’s Walker Cup at The Los Angeles Country Club’s North Course.
Among the 10 players chosen by the USGA’s International Team Selection Committee to represent the USA team against Great Britain and Ireland in the 46th Match (Sept. 9-10) were Sacramento’s Cameron Champ, former Stanford standout Maverick McNealy and Cal standout Collin Morikawa.
Champ, 22, was one of two amateurs to make the 36-hole cut in the 2017 U.S. Open, tying for 32nd. He won this year’s Trans-Mississippi Amateur by four strokes and was runner-up in the Pacific Coast Amateur.
McNealy, 21, earned the Mark H. McCormack Medal as the world’s top-ranked amateur in 2016. The 2015 NCGA Amateur Match Play champion was a member of the 2015 USA Walker Cup Team and halved his Sunday singles match with Paul Dunne. He was a first-team All-American and first-team All-Pac-12 Conference selection for the third consecutive season as a senior at Stanford University. This past season he was the recipient of the Ben Hogan Award as the nation’s top collegiate player, and received the Byron Nelson Award and Pac-12 Scholar-Athlete of the Year.
Morikawa, a junior at Cal, advanced to the Round of 16 for the second consecutive year in the U.S. Amateur Championship. He earned first-team All-American and first-team Pac-12 Conference honors as a sophomore at the University of California.
The Walker Cup Match is a biennial amateur team competition between the USA and a team composed of players from Great Britain and Ireland, selected by The R&A. The Match is played over two days with 18 singles matches and eight foursomes (alternate-shot) matches. The USA leads the overall series, 35-9-1, but the teams have split the last 14 meetings since 1989.
-NCGA Staff
