Shepherd, Furtney claim USGA Four-Ball title

<p>This fall, Erica Shepherd and Megan Furtney will be playing together for one of the elite teams in women’s collegiate golf.</p><p>The future Duke teammates got a taste Wednesday of what it’s like to win wearing blue.</p><p>Shepherd, a senior at Center Grove, and Furtney completed a triumphant run through the match-play bracket to win the fifth annual U.S. Women’s Amateur Four-Ball tournament at Timuquana Country Club in Jacksonville, Florida.</p><p>The duo, seeded fifth, won the championship match against 27th-seeded Jillian Bourdage and Casey Weidenfeld, 2 and 1.</p>[sc:text-divider text-divider-title="Story continues below gallery" ]Click here to purchase photos from this gallery<p>&quot;This whole week we just had a really good routine,&quot; Shepherd said. &quot;None of us played out of our minds at any point, but we just played together really well.</p><p>&quot;Hopefully we can carry all this momentum into Duke.&quot;</p><p>It’s the second USGA title for Shepherd, who won the U.S. Girls Junior in 2017. She and Furtney had advanced to the Four-Ball semifinals last year before being eliminated.</p><p>The chance to win as part of a team was particularly satisfying for Shepherd, who did not play high school golf at Center Grove.</p><p>&quot;It’s definitely more meaningful,&quot; she said. &quot;Anything is definitely more special when you have somebody to share it with.&quot;</p><p>As was the case in most of their matches this week, Shepherd and Furtney got out to an early lead in the title clash, putting up birdie 3s on the second and third holes. Bourdage and Weidenfeld responded with a birdie to win the fourth, but the Blue Devil duo birdied the par-3 fifth and the par-4 seventh to take a three-hole lead to the back nine.</p><p>Bourdage and Weidenfeld cut the gap to two by winning the 13th, but the underdogs ran out of holes. Shepherd and Furtney halved the next four to close it.</p><p>Shepherd said that a key birdie putt from Furtney on the 10th hole to answer a birdie and keep them up three was a big moment in the match.</p><p>&quot;After that, I felt pretty good about them not having a chance to come back,&quot; she said.</p><p>The semifinal match against eighth-seeded Amari Avery and Alexa Pano was a back-and-forth affair early on, with the two sides halving only one of the first nine holes, before Shepherd and Furtney pulled away to win, 4 and 3.</p><p>Pano was a teammate of Shepherd on the United States team at last year’s Junior Ryder Cup in Paris.</p><p>Shepherd and Furtney fell behind for the first and only time in the entire tournament when they bogeyed the first hole — but they didn’t trail for long. They won the second hole with a par to even it up, then pulled ahead with a birdie on the par-5 fourth.</p><p>Avery and Pano birdied the par-3 fifth to knot it again, but Shepherd and Furtney regained the lead right away with another par-5 birdie, this one on No. 6. The match was tied once more after seven before birdies on the par-3 eighth and par-4 ninth put Shepherd and Furtney back on top.</p><p>Wins at the 13th and 14th increased the lead to four holes, helping provide Shepherd and Furtney with about two hours to rest before the final while Bourdage and Weidenfeld needed 20 holes to finish off second-seeded Sadie Englemann and Rachel Heck in the other semifinal match.</p><p>The weeklong tournament — all 127 holes of it — started off an extremely hectic stretch for Shepherd, who will play in a U.S. Women’s Open qualifier next Monday after going to her senior prom on Saturday.</p><p>&quot;We’ll see how that goes,&quot; Shepherd said. &quot;It’ll definitely be an intense three days.&quot;</p>