Charley Jacobs Crowned SA Amateur Champ for 2020

Photo: Charley Jacobs and Sam Slater are the South Australian Amateur champions for 2020 | Golf Australia

Charley Jacobs (Glenelg Golf Club) produced a stunning birdie blitz to break a long run of outs for local women while Queenslander Sam Slater carved out his biggest win in the finals of the South Australian Amateur on 2nd October.

Glenelg’s Jacobs, 18, wrote a prelude to her coming American college career to begin in 2021 by dominating the women’s final at Mt Osmond Golf Club, needing just 27 holes in crushing Queensland’s Sarah Wilson 10 and 9.

Slater, 19, who plays out of Brisbane Golf Club, beat Josh Armstrong of New South Wales in the men’s final also convincingly, five and four.

Jacobs’ victory will be much-celebrated in Adelaide where there has not been a hometown winner of the state women’s title since 2011.

Her performance matched the occasion; she was effectively two-under par (and four up in the match) after the first 18 holes against Wilson, and proceeded to shoot six-under par for the next nine holes in the afternoon to close it out early.

She was the equivalent of eight-under par for 27 holes. “On the back nine I just clicked,” she said later. “This afternoon, I just went ‘bang’. The rules official just told me that I shot 30 on the front nine (of the second 18 holes).”

Jacobs, who moved with her family from Ardrossan on the York Peninsula to Adelaide when she was 14 to further her golf, previously won the Dunes Medal in 2019, but this is her first state title. “I putted really well,” she said. “I just hit it everywhere that I needed to hit it, didn’t make many mistakes. I was nervous at lunch, because I had momentum and I didn’t really want to stop.

“All the scenarios were going through my head. But I birdied two and three after lunch and that was key. It was perfect, basically. It was like ‘I’ve got this’. I had four birdies in a row and I wasn’t even thinking about whether I was playing good; just thinking about the next shot as my focus.”

Jacobs had some friends and her coach Adrian Wickstein on hand to watch, and the hometown aspect was important to her. “It’s awesome to win your home amateur,” she said. “In a way, you get sick of the interstate players coming here and taking the trophy from you. So it’s really exciting.”

She was due to have been at Iowa State University a while back, but Covid-19 intervened.

She will head to the US in January as a state champion now. “It’s always been a dream, since I was about 12,” she said of her sojourn into the college system. “I’ve been working towards that.”

Excerpt from Golf Australia. Read the full article here