Qualifying - World Junior Teams Championship

The first tournament this year that I travelled with the players for was the Asian qualifying for the World Junior Teams Championship. This event is open to qualifiers from all over the world and the final will be held in Japan later in the year. The Asian qualifying event was held in Malaysia and I took the Taiwan team of four boys to play in this event. The same four boys played last year and Taiwan didn't qualify for the final so we were all keen to do better this year.

The tournament is three rounds of stroke play with the best three scores from each country to count each day. The top two teams from the qualifying round are the ones to go through to the final. There are teams from Japan, Korea, India, Singapore, Philippines and of course Taiwan playing. Korea and Japan are traditionally the strongest and Korea have two teams playing.

We flew from a cold winter Taiwan to a hot tropical Malaysia and then drove for six hours (meant to be four but the driver got lost) to the resort/golf course we were staying at. The boys rested well that night and we played a practice round in the morning trying to avoid the tropical heat. I walked the course with them helping them with their yardage books and discussing different options for certain holes. The 9th is a drivable par 4 over water and we decided that the longer hitters could go for the green if their driver was working well for the early holes. I thought it was strange that Taiwan players were the only team to attempt to drive the green. Our players made some easy birdies and never made worse than par. We also noticed some amazing views and some interested spectators around the course (see pictures).

All the players played well the first day with Huang Tao scoring 69, Hung Chein-Yao scoring 73 and Hsieh Chi-Hsien and Hsu Hao-Sheng each scoring 76. This gave us a team score of 2 over par and placed us in first place, one stroke ahead of Japan.

The second round scores weren't quite as good as the first round. Huang Tao had 72, Hung Chien-Yao had 73 again, Hsu Hao-Sheng had 76 again and Hsieh Chi-Hsien had 79. This gave us a team score for the day of +5 and moved our overall score to +7. Fortunately we increased our lead and went into the final round with a seven stroke lead over Japan and an eleven stroke lead over one of the teams from Korea. Three of the Taiwan players were also in the top 10 of the individual rankings as well.

Before the final round we spoke about making sure we just played to our course plans and did not worry about the other players around us. We spoke about how easy it would be to go out and try and protect the lead rather than sticking to our plans. The players did well with Hsieh Chi-Hsien having 70, Hung Chien-Yao shooting 73 (again!) and Huang Tao and Hsu Hao-Sheng having 75. Our team score for the day was +2 and our final score for the tournament was +9. We managed to increase our lead over the other countries and we finished first ahead of Korea and Japan.

So the boys will be off to the final in Japan later in the year. With the rest of the world being there it will be a great challenge for the Taiwan junior players and will give them a better idea of how they compare to the rest of the world.

Until next time,

Brent