How Stanford has taken over the Augusta National Women’s Amateur

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Andrea Revuelta’s keys and eyeglasses spill onto the marble table as she sits down to join her teammate. It’s the last day of finals week here at Stanford, and when Revuelta explains she is hours away from her economics exam, a cloud of stress momentarily lingers in the air.

Teammate Meja Örtengren, seated to her left, allows a sliver of a smile to emerge on her face while all of this is happening. And it’s not hard to figure out why. Örtengren finished her exams yesterday. Sweet, sweet relief.

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The two sophomores are days away from their spring break, but the time off will look different for them and for the majority of the rest of Stanford women’s golf. Revuelta, who hails from Madrid, and Örtengren, who grew up in Sweden, are two of the five women on the roster who are playing in the seventh annual Augusta National Women’s Amateur, which begins Wednesday with the final round on Saturday. It’s time for them to turn their attention to a grander stage, one that they physically can’t stop thinking about every spring.

“We talk about post-ANWA depression,” Revuelta says. “It should be diagnosed. I personally wore green for two weeks straight (after last year). I was like, I can’t move on.”

Revuelta, Örtengren, senior Megha Ganne, senior Kelly Xu, and junior Paula Martín Sampedro are all ANWA invitees. Actually, the staggering number of Cardinals in the field is six if you count an incoming freshman, Nikki Oh. And it’s eight if you stretch all the way to phenoms Asterisk Talley and Anna Fang, both of whom verbally committed to Stanford as juniors in high school.

The ANWA, created by Augusta National Golf Club in 2019, offers players a chance to compete against the best in the world on a heightened platform, just days before the Masters begins. The tournament begins at Champions Retreat, and the players who make the cut (top 30s and ties) move on to play a final round at Augusta National. It is the crown jewel of women’s amateur golf, and one of the biggest events of the year on the women’s golf calendar.

And this year, the current and future Stanford women make up 11 percent of that 72-woman field. That’s the No. 1 program in the country, for you. They’re also used to it: Ganne is making her sixth start in the tournament, Örtengren is making her fifth, and the rest of the girls are playing for the third time.

If you’re wondering how this is all possible, all you have to do is look at the scores of the weekly qualifying rounds the Stanford women play to determine their weekly lineup. They play inter-team individual competitions, a standard practice for collegiate golf programs, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The bar is always getting higher.

“If I don’t shoot under 3-under, it’s not going to be top-5. And if you’re shooting 4-under, you know someone’s out there shooting 6-under. Because out of the nine players, at least one is doing it,” Revuelta says.

“With this team, it’s kind of insane,” Örtengren says.

Women's Amateur Golf RankingRankingPlayerCollege1Kiara RomeroOregon2Paula Martin SampedroStanford3Andrea RevueltaStanford4Farah O'KeefeTexas5Meja OrtengrenStanford6Megha GanneStanford7Maria Jose MarinArkansas8Eila GalitskySouth Carolina9Soomin OhN/A10Asterisk Talley*Stanford

(Source: World Amateur Golf Ranking. Asterisk notes underclassmen.)

That’s the kind of daily push that starts to feel normal when you become a member of this program. Stanford’s practice facility, the Siebel Varsity Golf Training Complex, is the hub of it all. There’s always a player there, doing drills or lifting weights, so the others know they’ll never have to hone their craft alone. Team members even pile into a conference room in the building to do their homework together. Stanford professors do not go easy on the golfers. Revuelta had to take a midterm after completing a 10-hour, 36-hole tournament day this winter. There’s a constant assumption that if you’re not studying or practicing, someone else is — getting better, and potentially getting ahead.

“Being at Stanford in itself is hard,” says Revuelta. “Being on Stanford women’s golf is adding another gear to it.”

Anne Walker has been at the helm of this dynasty since 2012. The head coach led the Cardinal to three NCAA titles and saw Rose Zhang win the ANWA in her final semester as a collegiate player. Through it all, she successfully established Stanford as the premier destination for the most driven and talented female players in the game. Walker runs a tight ship, but she’s fostered an environment in which her players naturally drive each other. Once you get to Palo Alto, the work has only just begun.

“The respect level is so high,” Walker says. “They never feel that they’re getting beat by someone that’s not world-class. If they get beat by that person, it’s an earned win.”

Perhaps that is why this current class of Stanford women can’t seem to stop winning. Ganne won the U.S. Amateur at Bandon Dunes in August. Martín Sampedro became the first player since 2006 to win both the Women’s Amateur Championship and the European Ladies Amateur Championship in the same season. And Örtengren won a professional Ladies European Tour event.

Xu is somehow the lowest-ranked player of the group at No. 20 in the world — the others are all in the top 6. Revuelta is coming off a four-shot win in a February college event and tied for fourth place at the ANWA last year. The group chat is firing at all hours of the day, with the women celebrating each other’s accomplishments, despite the sport being an inherently individual race to the top.

“I think this environment of being pushed so hard together, with a tough academic setting, and a team that wants to do so well really brings us closer together,” says Örtengren.

The girls are constantly picking each other’s brains on the game or simply learning by example. Örtengren and Revuelta point to Ganne, one of the team’s unequivocal leaders, as the sort of player who exudes positivity and never lets you know she’s struggling with something. Whereas they admire Xu for her methodical approach to the game, and poke fun at her for playing “geometry golf.”

The women bond over their differences and their similarities — Revuelta and Martín Sampedro, both from Madrid, grew up playing together on Spain’s national team and know each other’s games inside and out. The team recently had a long conversation in which they analyzed each player’s “tournament aura.” There are tri-weekly team breakfasts in between those intense qualifying rounds, where all of these discussions about the sport and the team occur. The end result is a cohesive but constantly driven group of golfers, unsurprisingly taking over the women’s amateur game.

“It’s pretty special, and I know that they all realize how rare it is and how unique the moment is,” says Walker. “They all do their very best to soak it up every minute. So that as a coach makes me stoked.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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