Championship venues for 2007

Royal Lytham & St. Annes will host the Amateur Championship from 18^th to 23^rd June as one of the venues named by The R&A for events in 2007. While Lytham has had ten Open Championships played over its historic links, 2007 will mark only the fourth Amateur Championship to be played there since the first in 1935. Then, American Walker Cup player Lawson Little successfully defended the title he had claimed twelve months earlier at Prestwick. Little, Horace Hutchinson, Harold Hilton, Michael Bonallack and Peter McEvoy still remain the only players to have successfully defended the Amateur Championship.

St. Annes Old Links, many times a Final Qualifying venue for The Open, will be used in parallel with Royal Lytham & St. Annes on the two days of stroke play qualifying.

Royal Porthcawl has hosted many R&A championships including a total of six Amateur Championships and in 2007 will be the destination for juniors from around the world who will be targeting the Boys Amateur Championship.

However Porthcawl is perhaps best remembered for the memorable GB&I win over the U.S. in the 1995 Walker Cup match. That match almost marked a turning point in what to then had been a one-sided series of contests and was a catalyst leading to GB&I winning the three most recent encounters and four of the last five. The only Boys Championship to be played there in 1984 resulted in Lee Vannett of Carnoustie defeating Sweden’s Adam Mednick by 2/1.

Further west along the south Wales coast, Ashburnham, five miles beyond Llanelli, will host the Boys Home Internationals. Playing on home territory on a course largely unknown to players outside Wales, may give the home side the advantage and the chance of adding to their only win in the series, a tie with Scotland at Royal Mid-Surrey in 1992. As recently as 2002 Ashburnham was the venue for the Ladies’ British Amateur Championship won by Wheatley’s Rebecca Hudson.

The British Mid-Amateur Championship will be played at Alwoodley Golf Club, and while this Leeds based club will be hosting its first R&A Championship, it has on many occasions been one of the venues used for Open Championship Regional Qualifying. It has also hosted many ladies’ tournaments including the British and English Championships.

Notts Golf Club is the venue for the Jacques Leglise Trophy match between the boys of GB&I and their continental counterparts. Long recognised as an outstanding championship layout, the Club recently has taken steps to restore the course to its original heath land layout, involving extensive removal and thinning out of trees and shrubs and the reintroduction of heathers and gorse. It is acknowledged that the works have successfully opened up the course which is now back to the layout and condition originally envisaged.

The venue for the Seniors Open Amateur Championship has yet to be finalised and will be announced shortly.

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