14-Year-Old Girl Wins Boys’ State High School Championship
Fourteen-Year Old Phoebe Brinker Became The First Female To Win The Delaware State Boys' High School Championship In Its 43-Year History - Image Courtesy GolfforHer
By Mike Stachura for GolfDigest.com
In Delaware golf, the women are taking over. Well, the young women are. On Wednesday, June 1st, eighth-grader Phoebe Brinker became the first female to win the Delaware high school golf championship in its 43-year history, and she and teammate Jennifer Cleary helped Tower Hill win the team title by 22 shots.
Brinker, who won by six shots over second-place finisher Matt Pulgini, a recent medalist at U.S. Open local qualifying in Hellertown, Pa., was one of three girls to finish in the top five at the Delaware Interscholastic Athletic Association golf championship at Rehoboth Beach CC.
“That feels really good,” Brinker told The News-Journal after posting a two-day total of 4-under-par 140. “It’s just really cool. I feel like maybe it’s just male-dominated, and it’s just cool to break that stereotype.”
Of course, Brinker and her distaff friends had a little help. Though they competed on equal terms with the boys, they were not playing from the same tees. The girls played the par-72 course at 5,280 yards, while the boys played it at 6,250.
The idea, seen in other states where females and males compete in the same event, was to play the yardage at 85 percent of the boys’ length while keeping similar hazards in play, said Kevin Charles, executive director of the DIAA.
“We’ve never had anything like three girls in the top five before,” Charles told Golf Digest. “You can wonder if we created too much of an advantage for them, but this was no fluke. They played great. They were the real deal, right down the middle all day long. They would have competed if they would have played from the same tees.
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