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By Chris Lang
HOT SPRINGS — Charlottesville’s Natalie Easterly won the Virginia State Golf Association Senior Women’s Stroke Play Championship last year at Blacksburg Country Club, 10 years after claiming her first title in that event.
Could the same result be in the cards Friday at The Omni Homestead Resort?
Easterly won her lone VSGA Senior Women’s Amateur championship in 2008. With her win in Thursday’s semifinals at the 61st VSGA Senior Women’s Amateur Championship, she put herself in position to snag another decade-later championship.
She’ll face a familiar foe in Friday morning’s championship match. Springfield’s Mimi Hoffman rallied in her semifinal against Keswick’s Cindy Thompson to advance to her seventh Women’s Senior Amateur final. Easterly defeated Hoffman 4 and 3 in 2008’s final match.
“Natalie is an incredible player,” Hoffman said. “She did really well in the stroke play, and she’s been doing great all year. I’ve got a very, very tough match in front of me, but I look forward to it. I played her once before in the finals, and she beat me on 15. So that’s in my head. I’m going to try to focus really hard. I’ll need to. She’s playing great.”
Getting to the final match was not easy for either competitor. Easterly (CC of Virginia) needed 19 holes to hold off another past champion, Alexandria’s Shelley Savage. Hoffman (Belle Haven CC) got up and down for par on 18 to defeat Thompson (Glenmore CC) 1 up.
Starting times were delayed by two hours Thursday due to heavy rainfall in the area. Though the rain slowed enough to allow the semifinals to start, intermittent showers throughout the round left the course saturated. Not only was lift, clean and place in play, but all bunkers were able to be treated as ground under repair because many of them were filled with standing water.
The sogginess of the course altered players’ strategy.
“We were hitting a lot more club today,” Easterly said. “If you had 90 yards, you were hitting more like it was 120. There was nothing, no roll. It just hits and stops. You were using your brain a lot more, too. But that’s part of the deal.”
In the first semifinal, Hoffman made a birdie on the first hole to go 1 up. Thompson answered with a par on No. 2 to win the hole and square the match, and she took the lead with a par on No. 3. She wouldn’t trail again until the end of the match.
Thompson took a 2-up lead to the par-3 16th hole, but it evaporated when she made three straight bogeys to close the match. Hoffman responded with pars on 16 and 17 to square the match before getting up and down for par on 18 to win.
“I was two down with three to go, and what I kept going to—what was living in my brain—is that I had been in this situation before,” Hoffman said, crediting caddie Kay Tyler for steadying her nerves down the stretch. “I just started to think about the really good shots I’ve had there in the past, in that sort of situation. That kind of helped me out on 16, 17 and 18.”
The Easterly-Savage match was a battle befitting a pair of past champions. Easterly got hot early, draining about a 40-foot birdie putt on No. 4 and a 6-foot birdie putt on No. 5 to go 2 up. She held a 3-up lead through 11 holes, but it was clear the game Savage (Army Navy CC) wasn’t going to go away quietly.
Savage sank a birdie putt on 12 to cut into the lead and squared the match when Easterly uncharacteristically three-putted on 14 and 15.
“Sometimes I have a little slump in the middle of a round,” Easterly said. “It’s like a low blood-sugar thing … I don’t know what happens. I was like, ‘C’mon now, c’mon now, hang in there!’ I was getting really mentally tired.”
The match remained square until the players returned to No. 1 for the first extra hole. Each player found the fairway with both their drives and their approaches. Easterly was first to hit her third shot, and she hit a near-perfect shot that settled two feet from the hole. Savage’s approach came up short of the green, though she nearly rolled in a long putt for birdie that would have extended the match. Savage conceded Easterly’s birdie putt, ending the match.
“It’s such a joy to play with and against her,” Easterly said. “She plays with such sportsmanship. It was really fun today. We both were just dinging and donging.”
The Senior Women’s Amateur Championship also features play in six non-championship division flights. For full results, please click the match play brackets link at the top of this release.