Sunday, April 5, 2009

Queen Sirikit Cup

April 1-3 were the dates that the Queen Sirikit Cup was held in Bali, Indonesia. This tournament is the women's team championships for the Asia-Pacific region. Each country that plays is represented by three players who play stroke play for three days. The best two scores are used each day to give the team score for the country. The winner of the Queen Sirikit Cup is the country with the lowest team score for the three days. Last year this event was held in Japan and the winning team was Korea. My Taiwan players finished third last year so I was keen for them to improve this time.

The players representing Taiwan this year was Yao Hsuan-Yu, Hsieh Yu-Ling and Tsai Pei-Ying. They teed up on the Par 74 Nirwana Bali golf course for the first round on the 1st of April. Hsieh Yu-Ling had 68, Tsai Pei-Ying had 71 and Yao Hsuan-Yu had 72 which gave us a team score of -9. This placed us in second place behind Korea who had a team score of -11. The second day scores were Yao Hsuan-Yu 68, Tsai Pei-Ying 73 and Hsieh Yu-Ling 77. This gave us a daily score of -7 and two day score of -18 This placed us in second place behind Korea on -25. The final round produced scores of 71, 75 and 76 for Yao Hsuan-Yu, Tsai Pei-Ying and Hsieh Yu-Ling respectively. This was our worst day for scoring but our final team score was -18 which placed us in second place, 10 strokes behind the winning team from Korea.

Yao Hsuan-Yu finished 3rd in the individual section of the tournament with Tsai Pei-Ying coming 7th and Hsieh Yu-Ling finishing in 11th place. This will be a confidence boost for Yao Hsuan-Yu as it is the biggest tournament she has played for Taiwan and she has played very well.

Overall the girls did very well and I am very proud of their achievement in this event. We improved from last year both on score and finish position so they should be very proud of themselves. 3rd in 2008, 2nd in 2009 and Queen Sirikit Cup champions in 2010 is what we are aiming for now!

Until next time,

Brent