By some accounts, AI will soon allow a person to be in two places at the one time. Catriona Matthew, who has captained two winning Solheim Cup sides and is out to complete the same captaincy double in this year’s Curtis Cup at Bel-Air Country Club in Los Angeles from 12-14 June, would like to have been that person over the weekend.
On the one hand, she had arranged to go to the European Nations Cup in Spain to watch a few of the players she had in mind for the Great Britain & Ireland side. And on the other, she would like to have followed a 29-year-old Scot by name of Clara Young in the Helen Holm Scottish Women’s Open Championship at Royal Troon, where others were vying for places in the team.
Young is a player for whom Matthew could not have more respect.
Why? Because she has just done what Matthew would like to see more of the women professionals doing in regaining her amateur status in order to play golf and work at the same time.
In Young’s case, the decision to return to the amateur scene was down to the problem she was having in making a decent living. “You watch the majors on TV and you think that your best golf isn’t far away from that level, but it’s all about consistency,” she said. “You can have one good tournament but you need to do it week in, week out. While I enjoyed my time as a pro, I’m glad I stopped.
“I had one win on the Santander Tour, and I enjoyed the time I spent on the Sunshine Tour in South Africa. It was fun chasing my dreams but I realised it was right to call a halt.”
Still more importantly, she had the guts to act on that realisation where plenty of others just hang around on the lesser tours and get nowhere. The latter are the ones who trouble Matthew most. She just wishes that they would think more at the outset as to whether they are good enough to make it as professionals.
That the older players – i.e. those who are over 25 or 30 – are now known as mid-amateurs is vaguely insulting, if hardly as bad as what goes on in tennis where the over-30s are called veterans.
At the moment, Young has a job with the management consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers, and is currently on study leave as she works on her Chartered Accountancy exams. Unfortunately, they ruled out some of the practice she would like to have put in ahead of her first return to competitive action at the Scottish Women’s Open, where she finished joint 13th.
“She’s definitely among the players I would have wanted to watch at Troon,” said Matthew of this winner of the 2015 Scottish Women’s Amateur Championship. “For sure, she’s a good player and she’s really good technically. She sometimes struggles under pressure and, with exams coming up, she won’t have had too much in the way of expectation. Yet you never know. It’s in those circumstances that you can play well.”
With some amateur success, Young could be a wild-card choice, Matthew acknowledged.
Inevitably, Young’s circumstances put one in mind of what happened when Ireland’s Stuart Grehan regained his amateur status last year. In October 2024, he had just finished his third round in the D+D Real Czech Challenge on the HotelPlanner Tour, Europe’s second tier, when it hit him that he was getting nowhere. “It was a Saturday, and that night I filled in my form saying I wanted my amateur status back,” he said.
He retrieved it six months later and, a few weeks further on, won the Irish Open Amateur Championship and the Irish Amateur Close Championship, and was on his way to making his Walker Cup debut at Cypress Point Club, where he promptly collected 1½ points.
Like Young, Grehan had asked himself many times where he fell short as a professional. “Did I think I was good enough? Absolutely. And I still think I am. But when I looked at it all on a deeper level, it came down to me not being in love with the lifestyle and not wanting to be away from my wife and child for weeks at a time.”
“It’s amazing seeing him,” said his wife. “He’s been through so much. He’s now working as a financial advisor and just seems in a happier place. And if he’s happy, I’m happy.”
Over the last few months of being in no-man’s land, Young has been getting a kick out of playing with family and old friends at North Berwick. Of course the talk is of how she will soon be back in the Scottish team and, if anyone is asking if she is worried about approaching her 30s when so many of the players might be years younger than she is, she needs to forget it.
Having one or more mature players in a Scottish team, or a Walker or Curtis Cup side, for that matter, never did any harm in the past, but all that seems to have changed now that the amateur game is top heavy with young golfers who are chasing World Amateur Golf Ranking points and a professional career. (Last year, all the players, bar two, in the Helen Holm tournament came into that category.)
Carol Semple Thompson was still playing for the American Curtis Cup side at the age of 53, and Belle Robertson, who will tell you that she was probably at her best in the first few years of her 30s, was still playing for team GB&I at 50.
Dean Robertson, who is captaining the 2026 Walker Cup side, had this to say when he was asked about having the then 32-year-old Grehan in his team last year: “He brings a little bit of maturity to the side. Otherwise, they’re pretty much all kids. You need a balance.”
Top: Clara Young
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