Hannah Darling sets birdie record, leads Augusta National Women’s Amateur

Hannah Darling is again on the Augusta Nationwide Girls’s Newbie for a 3rd time, and apparently she’s loads snug.

Darling opened her first spherical on Wednesday with three straight birdies and made six whole on the entrance. She completed with eight birdies general — a event report — en path to her six-under 66 and first-round lead at Champions Retreat in Evans, Ga.

“The best way I assumed my manner across the golf course was nice at the moment,” mentioned Darling, who’s from Bonnyrigg, Scotland, and is a junior on the South Carolina girls’s golf staff. “I used to be actually disciplined. Me and my caddie, we made some actually good targets, and we have been simply hitting dedicated pictures to these targets. I hit just about each shot at the moment nice, and I didn’t hit each nice golf shot, however we hit nice pictures to our intention and to our targets.”

Final 12 months on the ANWA, Darling missed the lower by a stroke. In 2022 she tied for twenty seventh.

On Wednesday, Darling, 20, made a 10-foot downhill putt for birdie on the opening gap, then drained a 30-footer for birdie on the second. She rolled in a four-footer for her third straight birdie. She bogeyed the subsequent two, solely to birdie three of the subsequent 4 for a four-under 32 on the entrance.

“I keep in mind listening to an Annika [Sorenstam] quote when she shot 59, she had made fairly a couple of birdies in a row, and he or she was like, ‘I simply have to make a par,’” Darling mentioned. “I mentioned to my caddie, I simply wish to make a par, and I made a bogey. I used to be settled down. I used to be effective. However yeah, I simply made some nice putts that usually wouldn’t drop, however they did at the moment, and yeah, it was an amazing day.”

Francesca Fiorellini, Eila Galitsky and Ingrid Lindblad all shot 65 and are one off the lead after the opening day. Lindblad, the top-ranked girls’s newbie, is making her fourth ANWA look, and in each 2021 and 2022 she completed a shot behind the winner.

Final 12 months’s winner, Rose Zhang, turned professional, however 2022 ANWA champ Anna Davis is 2 underneath and T12 after the primary spherical.

The ANWA resumes with the second spherical on Thursday at Champions Retreat, with the highest 30 and ties advancing to the ultimate spherical on Saturday at Augusta Nationwide Golf Membership. Right here’s how you can track all of the action on Thursday.

Josh Berhow

Golf.com Editor

As GOLF.com’s managing editor, Berhow handles the day-to-day and long-term planning of one of many sport’s most-read information and repair web sites. He spends most of his days writing, enhancing, planning and questioning if he’ll ever break 80. Earlier than becoming a member of GOLF.com in 2015, he labored at newspapers in Minnesota and Iowa. A graduate of Minnesota State College in Mankato, Minn., he resides within the Twin Cities along with his spouse and two youngsters. You possibly can attain him at joshua_berhow@golf.com.