Friday, May 02, 2008

SemGroup Championship – 2nd Round

Paula Creamer leads after two rounds at the SemGroup Championship. She is also the only player under par at -1. Ji Young Oh is in second place at even par, Brittany Lang and Leta Lindley are tied for third at +1 while six other players are tied for fifth at +2.

The wind was not blowing quite as hard as it was Thursday, but you couldn’t tell it by the scoring. Five players posted rounds under par (a little better than Thursday’s four), the best of them Na On Min’s 68 and Jee Young Lee’s 69, but they were far outnumbered by the 80-somethings again. So far, this event feels like a rerun of last week’s Stanford International minus James Caan and Mike Schmidt – the greens aren’t holding (maybe a little better this week) because the wind has dried them out, shots short of the green aren’t bouncing up because of last night’s rain, and the players’ frustrations show on nearly every shot. After six straight rounds of this, you can hardly blame them.

Lorena Ochoa is not one of those I mentioned at the top – she is +5 and tied for 21st, six behind with 36 to play. Of course she still has a chance to win but she’ll need to make up two or three of those tomorrow to feel good about it. She'll need to start making birdies - she didn't get one today, first time we've seen that for a while. It isn’t often that players who are +7 through Friday still have hope of getting back in it, but since they are only eight shots behind…

The cut came at +10, the highest we’ve seen this year. Going home are Nicole Castrale, Angela Park, Natalie Gulbis, Morgan Pressel, Momoko Ueda and Sherri Steinhauer. Six more players withdrew today (11 have pulled out so far, an extremely high number), among them Grace Park and Brandie Burton.

1 comment:

firstbase31 said...

Still searching for why Brandie withdrew....looks like an injury, she had played 5 holes of the 2nd round before she withdrew.