Coming on the heels of her being named the state player of the
year by the Washington State Golf Association for the third time in
four years, Silverdale’s Erynne Lee was named Women’s Player of the
Year by the Pacific Northwest Golf Association on Tuesday. It’s the
second time Lee, a Central Kitsap grad now playing her first year
of college golf at UCLA, has won the award. She’s was also a
two-time WSGA junior player of the year and a former PNGA junior of
the year.
Lee, 18, won the Washington State Women’s Amateur by defeating her
sister Katie Lee by two strokes with a 54-hole total of 3-under
par, 213. A few weeks later, Lee reached the quarterfinals of
the U.S. Women’s Amateur at the Rhode Island Country Club.
Lee also played in the U.S. Women’s Open, won the Washington State
Class 4A championship and played in Canadian Women’s Tour events at
Beloeil, Blue Springs and Squamish Valley.
Lee tied for 8th, tied for 25th and finished 5th in her first three college tournaments for No. 1 ranked UCLA. She has 72.0 stroke average after nine rounds. Lee is not playing in this week’s tournament in Hawaii.
In a column in last week’s Sports Paper Weekly, a Sun publication that publishes on Thursdays, Kitsap Golf & Country Club pro Al Patterson ranked Lee as the best player to come out of the area.
“Please remember,” Patterson wrote, “that Erynne is only 18 years old, but as of today she is the 40th ranked women’s amateur in the world. In 2008 she finished the year ranked 18th in the same category. She really is one of the future stars in women’s golf.”
Here’s Patterson’s top 5: 1, Lee; 2, Troy Kelly, the Central Kitsap grad and ex-Husky who just secured his PGA Tour card for 2012 by finishing No. 11 on the Nationwide Tour money list; 3, George Bayer, the former Bremerton bomber who grew up near the KG&CC. Bayer didn’t turn pro until he was 29 and won four PGA Tour events during his career; 4, Scott Alexander, the director of golf at Gold Mountain; Alexander’s a former Washington State Amateur champion and top collegian golfer during his days at Seattle U; 5, Buzz Edmonds, “the best golfer in Kitsap Golf and Country Club history,” according to Patterson. Hard to argue. Buzz won the Kitsap Amateur three times and was a club champ nine times, winning it in five different decades.
What do you think about Patterson’s list? Who else belongs on it? Randy Jensen, the long-time pro at LakeLand Village, was one of the best in the Northwest for years; Connor Robbins played at Washington, reached the quarterfinals of the U.S. Amateur and had some success on golf’s mini tours; Ryan Kelly, Troy’s brother, could be dominant at times. If you wanted to expand the list to West Sound, you’d have to put Mark Wurtz on the list. The former Chimacum High star, who returned last summer to become the pro at Discovery Bay Golf Course in Port Towsned, won over 40 junior titles, two state high school titles and was second another year. He won over $100,000 on the PGA Tour in 1994.
