USGA Championships · 77th U.S. Girls’ Junior

The Vare Trophy Will Change Hands: U.S. Girls’ Junior Arrives at Old Chatham

With last year’s champion absent from the field, 156 players from 17 countries arrive in Durham, N.C., knowing the game’s most coveted junior title is guaranteed a new name. Six days at a renovated Rees Jones design will decide whose it becomes.

Old Chatham Golf Club hosts its second USGA championship this week. (Caption/credit TK)

DURHAM, N.C. — For the first time in a year, nobody owns the Glenna Collett Vare Trophy. Aphrodite Deng, who made history at Atlanta Athletic Club last July as the first Canadian to win the U.S. Girls’ Junior, does not return to defend, and so the 77th playing of the championship opens Monday at Old Chatham Golf Club with a rare certainty attached to it: whoever survives six days of qualifying and match play through the North Carolina pines will be a first-time USGA Girls’ Junior champion.

The championship that produced Mickey Wright, Nancy Lopez, JoAnne Gunderson Carner, Hollis Stacy, Inbee Park, Lexi Thompson, Ariya Jutanugarn and Minjee Lee has never lacked for pedigree, and the 2026 field holds the line. Twelve of the 156 players sit inside the top 100 of the Women’s World Amateur Golf Ranking®, seventeen countries are represented, and the age range runs from a 12-year-old Floridian to a college sophomore playing her final summer of junior eligibility. The average age of the field is 16.38. The average résumé is anything but junior.

Unfinished Business at the Top of the Draw

Nobody arrives with more to settle than Grace Carter. The 16-year-old from Jupiter, Fla., was the medalist at Atlanta Athletic Club a year ago at 6-under 136, then ran to the semifinals before falling to the eventual runner-up. The U.S. National Junior Team member has spent the twelve months since collecting two AJGA wins, a runner-up finish at the Nelly Invitational, and a trip to the championship match at the U.S. Women’s Amateur Four-Ball in May. She has been one match from the summit twice in fourteen months. The pattern is asking to be broken.

The player who beat her in that Atlanta semifinal is here too. Xingtong Chen of Singapore pushed Deng to the closing holes of last year’s 36-hole final before falling 2 and 1, and with the champion absent, the runner-up becomes the closest thing this field has to a player defending anything. Also returning with runner-up scar tissue: Athena Singh of Morehead, Ky., a finalist at the 2025 U.S. Women’s Amateur Four-Ball who teed it up at this year’s U.S. Women’s Open at Riviera, and Asia Young of Bend, Ore., the field’s lone reigning USGA champion, who won the 2025 Women’s Amateur Four-Ball alongside Natalie Yen.

The world-ranking heavyweight is Anna Iwanaga. The 17-year-old from Japan, No. 16 in the WAGR® and the highest-ranked player in the field, arrives fresh off a two-stroke win at the Toyota Junior World Cup and a runner-up finish at the Junior Invitational at Sage Valley. A member of the Japan National Team with seven ranked victories in 2025 alone, she is the kind of international entrant this championship has historically rewarded — last year’s final carried two international flags to the closing holes.

And then there is Amelie Zalsman, playing her fifth U.S. Girls’ Junior — more starts than anyone in the field. The 17-year-old U.S. National Junior Team member from St. Petersburg, Fla., reached the Round of 16 at The Women’s Amateur at Muirfield last month and has stacked a 2026 season that includes a win at the South Atlantic Amateur, a runner-up at the Mizuho Americas Open and top-fives at the Nelly and Sage Valley. Experience in this championship is currency. Zalsman is the richest player in the draw.

Caption/credit TK

Stanford Signees, a 13-Year-Old Contender, and the Youngest in the Field

The partnership to watch travels together. Jude Lee and Nikki Oh, both 18, both Southern Californians, both headed to the NCAA champion Stanford women’s golf team this fall, earned medalist honors as a side at this year’s U.S. Women’s Amateur Four-Ball. This week they go back to being rivals. Lee, a two-time U.S. National Junior Team member, played the 2025 U.S. Women’s Open at Erin Hills; Oh, the daughter of 1993 U.S. Open qualifier Ted Oh, won the 2025 Rolex Tournament of Champions and has reached the Round of 16 at a U.S. Women’s Amateur. Either would make a worthy champion. Both are running out of junior summers to become one.

Youth is not a curiosity in this field — it is a threat. Iris Lee of Orlando, all of 13 years old, became the youngest winner in the history of the Women’s Western Junior this season and reached the quarterfinals of the U.S. Women’s Amateur Four-Ball in May. The youngest player on the grounds, 12-year-old Bella Simoes of Lake Worth, Fla., is a former Drive, Chip & Putt national champion who once became the youngest player ever to attempt U.S. Women’s Open qualifying. Fourteen-year-old Seoah Kim of the Republic of Korea arrives ranked No. 30 in the world. The bottom of the age sheet reads like the top of a leaderboard.

Rounding out the deep American class: Anna Fang of San Diego, a 2024 quarterfinalist here and No. 48 in the world; Zoe Cusack of Potomac, Md., a Virginia signee coming off a Round-of-32 run at The Women’s Amateur at Muirfield; Mia Clausen of Carlsbad, Calif., with consecutive top-fives on two of junior golf’s toughest courses; and Amelia Harris of Australia, who has won six times in 2026, including her national junior amateur. Eleven members of the U.S. National Junior Team are in the field. Six players here teed it up at last month’s U.S. Women’s Open at Riviera.

The Home Game: Five Tar Heels, One Streak

North Carolina sends five players to its own party — Victoria Davis (Cary), Maria Isabella Errichetto (Southern Pines), Riley Grimm (Pinehurst), Ella June Hannant (Pikeville) and Jenna Kim (Raleigh) — and the local headliner is unmistakable. Jenna Kim, a rising senior at Durham Academy who has verbally committed to Yale, won the North Carolina Junior Girls’ and North Carolina Women’s Amateur in back-to-back weeks this summer, and owns four consecutive NCISAA state titles dating to a varsity debut she made in seventh grade. Old Chatham sits twenty minutes from her high school. The galleries will not be neutral.

Old Chatham: A Golf-Only Sanctuary Gets Its Second USGA Turn

The venue is a deliberate one. Old Chatham Golf Club was founded in 1999 by a group of Triangle business leaders — former USGA president Jim Hyler and North Carolina basketball legend Dean Smith among them — who wanted a golf-only club insulated from the region’s sprawl. What they built, on 400 acres of protected pine woodland near the northeast shore of Jordan Lake, was a Rees Jones design that opened in 2001 and has quietly become one of the state’s premier championship grounds.

The club’s first USGA championship came in 2019, when Bob Royak won the U.S. Senior Amateur here. The course the girls will see this week is meaningfully newer than the one the seniors played: Jones and associate Greg Muirhead have since overseen an extensive renovation that converted the fairways to zoysiagrass and the greens to Mach 1 hybrid bermudagrass, rebuilt the bunkers and tees, and added a new water feature at the par-4 16th — a late-round decision point that could loom large when matches reach the closing stretch. This will be the 39th USGA championship contested in North Carolina, a state that has crowned national champions from Pinehurst to Pine Needles and now hands the stage to the Triangle.

Caption/credit TK

How the Week Unfolds

The format is the classic USGA grind: 36 holes of stroke play across Monday and Tuesday, a cut to the low 64, then five rounds of match play compressed into four days, finishing with a 36-hole final on Saturday. Two rounds of match play on Thursday. Quarterfinals and semifinals on Friday. There is no way to steal this championship; it must be outlasted.

Stroke play begins Monday morning. Bookmark this hub — AmateurGolf.com will have round-by-round coverage, leaderboards, the full match play bracket and the road to Saturday’s 36-hole final, right here, all week.