Another major tournament for Chambers Bay

The USGA will again make Chambers Bay home as it announced that the course will host another one of its championships – this time the U.S. Amateur Four-Ball Championship in 2019. The tournament will be held May 25-29, 2019.

Chambers Bay has been a favorite with the USGA since opening. The course has hosted the U.S. Amateur in 2010 and the U.S. Open in 2015. The Home Course in DuPont will work with Chambers Bay on the 2019 U.S. Amateur Four-Ball with two qualifying rounds.

This is a new USGA championship and takes the place of the old USGA Public Links Championship. This new tournament started in 2015 at the Olympic Club and was held in 2016 at Winged Foot. The next two tournaments will take place at Pinehurst #2 and #4 and Jupiter Hills Golf Club.

“Bringing the USGA’s newest men’s championship to Chambers Bay underscores our strong relationship with Piece County as well as with the PNGA and WSGA, since it will be our third USGA championship in a decade,” said the USGA’s Stuart Francis.

It was also announced that Chambers Bay will also host the Pacific Coast Men’s Amateur in 2017, a tournament that annually features some of the top amateurs from around the country.

The USGA Amateur Four-Ball is a team competition that features partners playing a best-ball format for two days of qualifying before the top 32 teams advance to match play.

The field will consist of 128 two-player teams each playing their own ball throughout the round. Each team’s score will be determined by using the lower score of one of the partners for each hole. It is a championship strictly for amateurs with no age restrictions with a maximum handicap index of 5.4. It has become a popular event from the get go as it drew 2,234 team entries to qualify for 128 spots (256 players total), which were the third-most of any USGA championship for the Olympic Club. This year for Winged Foot Golf Club in Mamaroneck, New York, that number grew to 2,432 teams that tried to qualify.

In fact, it tends to draw more of the mid-amateur crowd. Its average age of the field at Winged Foot this year was 32 years old.

“It feels like a mid-amateur best ball, with a bunch of college kids sprinkled in,” said Bellevue’s Mike Haack, who teamed up with Tom Brandes to make the match play cut at the 2015 U.S. Amateur Four-Ball.