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By Chris Lang
GREAT FALLS — There will be an odd familiarity to Saturday’s final match of the 107th Virginia State Golf Association Amateur Championship, at least for those who are longtime followers of the event.
In 2015, Maclain Huge, a Virginia Tech player with professional aspirations, met an accomplished junior in the title match at Farmington Country Club. That junior: Mark Lawrence Jr., who at the time had three VSGA Junior Match Play titles and a VSGA Junior Stroke Play title to his credit.
Since then, Lawrence has accomplished plenty himself. He’s won both the VSGA Amateur and the Delta Dental State Open of Virginia. He’s reached the semifinals of the U.S. Amateur. And now, he sits on the precipice of another VSGA Amateur championship. He has professional aspirations of his own. Waiting for him in Saturday’s final at River Bend Club? You guessed it, an accomplished junior: Vienna’s David Stanford.
Lawrence and Stanford each won two matches on Friday to reach Saturday’s 36-hole final, which will tee off at 7:30 a.m. Stanford’s accomplishments in the last year: A VSGA Junior Stroke Play title, a top-10 finish at this year’s State Open, and a trip to the Amateur final in just his second appearance in the event.
The kicker: Stanford, 16, is committed to Virginia Tech, where Lawrence has spent the last several years.
“It would mean everything,” Stanford said of winning Saturday’s title match. “I’m so confident right now. And to add another tournament win, especially a state championship, it would just mean a lot.”
Lawrence, the stroke-play co-medalist and top seed, roared to an early lead and cruised to a 5-and-4 win over Roanoke’s Ross Funderburke in the quarterfinals Friday morning. He found much more resistance in the afternoon against another Roanoke Country Club member, Vince Wheeler, who plays for Rhodes College in Tennessee.
For the third time in four matches, Lawrence found himself down at the turn. Two down after eight holes, he made par on No. 9 to pull within one, and tied the match with a birdie on 12. He won the next two holes with birdie and took No. 15 with a par and suddenly had surged to a 3-up lead.
Wheeler wasn’t done, though. In both of his matches on Thursday, he won holes 16, 17, and 18. Pressed to the brink, Wheeler made birdie on 16 to cut into the lead, but his drive on 17 strayed to the right, leaving him a difficult shot from behind the trees with no real angle to the green.
Lawrence was in the middle of the fairway, and seeing Wheeler’s predicament, decided par was the safe play, considering he needed only to halve the whole to clinch the match. “I wasn’t going to be overly aggressive with my second shot,” he said.
Wheeler reached the green but had a long putt for par, and when Lawrence hit his birdie putt to within two feet, Wheeler conceded the hole, ending the match.
Stanford’s road on Friday was a bit less rocky. In the quarterfinals against Alexandria’s Teddy Zinsner, he lost the first two holes but quickly recovered. Wins on holes 7-10 gave him a 3-up lead, and he closed Zinsner out 4 and 2. Stanford blitzed Purcellville’s Alex Price in the semifinals, building a 5-up lead after 11 holes on his way to a 5-and-4 win.
“Well, I was even par through 14 and lost 5 and 4, so there’s not much I can do,” said Price, a sophomore at Christopher Newport University who made the Amateur as an alternate. “I could have made a couple of more birdie putts, but he made everything today. He played really well.”
Stanford and Lawrence were grouped together for stroke-play qualifying, so they know a little about each other’s game. Stanford’s steadiness and ability to play mostly mistake-free golf puts pressure on an opponent in match play.
“It’s funny, I texted Sharpie and Todd (Virginia Tech coach Brian Sharp and assistant Todd Eckstein) a couple of weeks ago and said, ‘You all got a stud in David,’” Lawrence said. “He’s 16, he shot three rounds under par at Ballyhack, which is really good for a 16 year old. He’s a really good player, and he’s got a really bright future.”
Lawrence is a gritty competitor with a wealth of match-play experience who is making his third trip to the VSGA Amateur final, and he knows how to navigate the mental highs and lows that exist in a 36-hole title match. It all sets up what should be an intriguing final day at River Bend.
Said Stanford: “I think it’s all mental. You can’t let yourself get down on unfortunate shots. You’ve just got to stick to it, because there’s a lot of golf out there. And anything can happen in match play.”
Lang is the VSGA’s manager of media and communications.