Maridoe Golf Club in Carrollton, Texas, has become something of a golf oasis in the midst of this pandemic. The club took it upon itself to demonstrate how golf could safely be played and proceeded to stage two fundraising events with a stout field of amateurs and pros – dubbed the Maridoe Samaritan Fund Invitational (and MSFI2.0) – then created the Maridoe Junior Invitational for the nation’s top up-and-coming players.
The Southern Amateur already was on the calendar for July 15-18, and it got an added boost June 17 when the U.S. Golf Association announced that the winner and runner-up would receive exemptions into the U.S. Amateur field, if they hadn’t already qualified for it.
Southern Amateur: Tee times and scoring
As a result, the field of 156 players includes some of the best college players and juniors in the nation. The 54-hole event begins Wednesday with a cut to the top 66 players and ties after the first two rounds.
PGA Tour events are the only tournaments with featured pairings. We present the four most stacked groups at the outset of the Southern:
12:50 p.m., No. 1: Quade Cummins, Cooper Dossey, Austin Eckroat
Impressive resumes here for some of the Big 12’s best. Oklahoma’s Cummins is the reigning Pacific Coast Amateur champ, and remains so for another year after that tournament was canceled for the summer. Baylor’s Dossey won the North & South Amateur in 2019, but came up two match-play victories short of a title defense earlier this month at Pinehurst. Eckroat, finished T-4 at the first MSFI event and finished as the low amateur that week.
12:50 p.m., No. 10: Phillip Barbaree, Preston Summerhays, Noah Goodwin
Three USGA champs with a unique bond make up this group. Barbaree, an LSU senior; Goodwin, an SMU junior and Summerhays, a high school senior committed to Arizona State, are all past champions of the U.S. Junior, with Summerhays being the defending champ. Goodwin won in 2017 and Barbaree in 2015.
All have been busy this summer but particularly Barbaree, who teed it up on the amateur circuit two of the past three weeks.
1:20 p.m., No. 1: John Pak, John Augenstein, Pierceson Coody
John Pak played perhaps the craziest schedule of all last summer, teeing it up six times in a 10-week stretch. More than perhaps any other player, he truly played his way onto the U.S. Walker Cup team with his summer performance. Pak is toning it down this summer, playing only the Southern, the Western Amateur and the U.S. Amateur and otherwise camping out in Tallahassee, Florida, where he attends Florida State.
Walker Cup teammate Augenstein won his last college start (the Desert Mountain Intercollegiate in March) on the strength of an opening 63 and also won the G-Rock Open (something like a rogue state open) at the start of June.
As for Coody, a member here, he’s already won a major amateur event at this venue. The Texas junior defeated Paul Gonzalez (also in the Southern field) by two shots almost exactly a year ago to win the Trans-Miss Amateur.
2:30 p.m., No. 1: Trent Phillips, Cole Hammer, Joe Highsmith
All three of these men land among the top 100 in the World Amateur Golf Ranking, with Hammer at No. 8, Phillips checking in at No. 36 and Highsmith at No. 92.
Hammer is a native Texan, and comes off a disappointing missed cut at the North & South. Highsmith beat his Pepperdine teammate Dylan Menante in the second round of the North & South, only to fall in the quarterfinals to eventual champion Tyler Strafaci. Phillips, a Georgia junior, is making his first major start since the Southern Highlands Collegiate. He won the Ka’anapli Collegiate Classic last fall.