Aphrodite Deng is 36 holes away from winning one of the most prestigious titles in amateur golf.<\/p>\n
The Golf Canada junior team member has advanced to the final of the 76th U.S. Girls’ Junior Championship at the Atlanta Athletic Club.<\/p>\n
Deng, 15, capped a two-win day at the 18-and-under event with a 2-and-1 win over Rayee Feng of the U.S. in the semifinals.<\/p>\n
Deng will face Singapore’s Xingtong Chen, 16, in the 36-hole final is Saturday. The winner earns a spot in next year’s U.S. Women’s Open, an LPGA Tour major.<\/p>\n
“It really means a lot,” Deng told The Golf Channel when asked about getting to the final. “I’ve been watching this tournament for a while and being to play tomorrow is really cool.”<\/p>\n
Deng finished 36th in the two-round stroke play portion of the event to advance to the 64-player match-play competition. She has now reeled off five wins in a row.<\/p>\n
Deng has climbed to 36th in the world women’s amateur golf rankings in the midst of a strong season. She has wins at the Mizuho Americas Open and the Junior Invitational.<\/p>\n
Deng was born in Calgary and her family lived in Montreal before moving to the U.S. for her dad\u2019s work. She mostly lives in Orlando now but remains a Canadian citizen.<\/p>\n
Notable previous winners of the U.S. Girls’ Junior include Nancy Lopez, Inbee Park, Lexi Thompson and Minjee Lee.<\/p>\n
No Canadian has ever won the event.<\/p>\n
\u2014 with files from The Canadian Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aphrodite Deng is 36 holes away from winning one of the most prestigious titles in amateur golf. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7173,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[443],"tags":[49,48,622,82],"class_list":["post-7172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7172\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}