{"id":873976,"date":"2026-08-28T01:26:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T01:26:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/873976\/"},"modified":"2026-08-28T01:26:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T01:26:10","slug":"crmc-championship-first-round-notes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/873976\/","title":{"rendered":"CRMC Championship &#8211; First Round Notes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"c-paragraph\">Bryan Lee (Fairfax, Virginia) and Charlie Nikitas (Glenview, Illinois) carded rounds of 6-under 64 Thursday at Cragun\u2019s Legacy Courses, and they share a one-stroke lead after the first round of the CRMC Championship presented by Northern Pacific Center in Brainerd, Minnesota.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph\">Lee\u2019s summer started by qualifying for the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills, and he\u2019s coming off back-to-back made cuts at the Osprey Valley Open (T56) and last week\u2019s Manitoba Open (T31). In four seasons at the University of Virginia, Lee helped lead the Cavaliers to two ACC Championship titles and a national runner-up finish in 2025, and he finished No. 17 in the PGA TOUR University Class of 2026 to earn PGA TOUR Americas membership.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph\">Joining Lee atop the leaderboard is Nikitas, who enters the week No. 31 on the points list. The third-year member has three top-10s this season, and his 64 matches his best first-round score in 30 starts on PGA TOUR Americas.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph\">Among the seven players tied for third at 5-under is Justin Biwer (San Diego, California), who made eight straight birdies (Nos. 5-12) \u2013 the longest such streak on Tour this season \u2013 but also added a triple bogey on No. 13 and a bogey on the par-5 17th.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph\">Also T3 at 5-under is University of Minnesota grad Ben Warian (Stillwater, Minnesota) and sponsor exemption Andrew Israelson (Staples, Minnesota), the 2025 Minnesota Section PGA Assistant Professional Player of the Year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bryan Lee (Fairfax, Virginia) and Charlie Nikitas (Glenview, Illinois) carded rounds of 6-under 64 Thursday at Cragun\u2019s Legacy&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":873977,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[443],"tags":[712,49,48,622,82],"class_list":["post-873976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-apple-news","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/873976","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=873976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/873976\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/873977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=873976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=873976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=873976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}