McCauley to Play in Augusta National Women's Amateur

Bella McCauley has been to the Augusta National Golf Club twice to compete in the of the Drive, Chip & Putt National Finals, but she has never played the iconic Augusta National course. That will change this spring.

Last week, McCauley received an invitation to play in the 2025 Augusta National Women's Amateur. It will be contested the first week of April. The first two rounds -- Wednesday, April 2nd and Thursday, April 3rd -- will be at Champions Retreat, on the Island and Bluff nines. On Friday, there will be a practice round at Augusta National (par 72, 6,365 yards), and that's where the final round of the ANWA will be played on Saturday. Everyone in the field will get a chance to play that practice round, but the field will be reduced to the top 30 (there will be a playoff, if necessary to get to 30) for the final round.

Seventy-two players will be in the field for the first two rounds. McCauley earned her spot by being among the top 30 Americans in the World Amateur Golf Rankings at the end of 2024. She is currently No. 58 overall, and is 22nd among the Americans.

The 21-year-old former Minnesota state high school champion (2019) from Inver Grove Heights is the only female to have won the Minnesota Golf Champions tournament (2021). She won the State Girls Junior PGA Championship in 2019 and '20, and the Minnesota Girls Junior in 2020.

She is now a junior on the University of Minnesota women's golf team (her sister Reese, a freshman at Minnesota and a two-time state high school champion, is also on the team). Bella won the 2024 Big Ten individual championship last April and will be available to defend her title this spring (April 18-20) in Maryland. But she will probably miss the Boilermaker Spring Classic, because it will begin April 6, the day after the final round of the ANWA. It was at the 2023 Boilermaker Fall Classic that McCauley claimed her first collegiate victory as a sophomore.

She finished third there last fall, and was in the top seven in all four tournaments that the Gophers played during the fall portion of their schedule. McCauley, who will graduate this spring, at the end of her third year -- although she plans to play a fourth year of college golf in 2025-26 as a grad student -- capped off the fall portion of the Gophers' 24-25 schedule by posting a 14-under-par total of 202 (66--68-68) in the Ron Moore Intercollegiate at the University of Denver's Highlands Ranch GC. That was good enough to give her a third collegiate victory (by four shots), and broke the school's scoring record. The old record of 203 was set in the fall of 2022 by teammate Luisamariana Mesones in Virginia Beach at the Evie Odom Invitational.

The Gophers will begin the winter-spring portion of their schedle Feb. 2-4 at the Puerto Rico Classic.