Charlie Woods’ U.S. Junior Amateur will continue into a third day.
Woods, the 17-year-old son of Tiger Woods, who won this USGA championship three straight times and now has the trophy named in his honor, shot even-par 70 Tuesday on Saucon Valley’s Grace Course to finish 36 holes of stroke-play qualifying at 5 over.
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With the top 64 players qualifying for the match-play portion, Woods, among those at T-63, will return to the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania layout on Wednesday morning for a 14-for-2 playoff, which will start at 7 a.m. ET and use, in order, hole Nos. 1, 5 and 18 on the Grace. The Old Course is the match-play host.
Woods’ second round, which followed Monday’s 5-over 76 on the Old and started Tuesday afternoon on No. 10, included a 2-under 33 first nine, which was highlighted by birdies at Nos. 16 and 18 and a two-putt eagle at the 332-yard, par-4 13th.
Woods bogeyed Nos. 4 and 7 coming in to slip just above the cut line.
This is Woods’ third straight U.S. Junior start, though he missed match play by considerable margins in each of his first two appearances. He carded rounds of 82-80 in his 2024 debut at Oakland Hills before posting 80-74 last year at Trinity Forest.
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With Woods’ future Florida State teammate Miles Russell firing a 5-under 66 Tuesday on the Old and sharing medalist honors at 6 under with Sohan Patel and Brayden Jones, there is a chance that if Woods is the first players to make it through the playoff he would be the 63rd seed and face Russell, the No. 2 seed, in the first round of matches.
Other notables advancing to match play include Vanderbilt incoming freshman Tyler Mawhinney (T-5), who has future teammate Luke Colton’s dad, Jim, on his bag this week; Czechia’s Louis Klein (T-11), who is the third highest-ranked player in the field at No. 65 in WAGR (Russell is No. 7 and France’s Oscar Couilleau, who is in the playoff, is No. 33); Florida commit Giuseppe Puebla (T-19), who qualified for this year’s U.S. Open and is ranked just behind Russell in the junior rankings; Tennessee commit Ronin Banerjee (T-29); Florida commit Jessy Huebner (T-51), who like Mawhinney and Puebla is on the U.S. National Junior Team; Pepperdine signee Luke Ringkamp (T-51), who has two AJGA invitational wins in the last eight months; and Auburn signee Hampton Beebe (T-51), who caddied for Puebla in the same U.S. Open final qualifier that Woods looped for Russell.
Among those missing the cut were incoming Georgia freshman Hamilton Coleman, who finished at 8 over to become the first defending champion to miss the cut at the U.S. Junior since at least 2002 (the USGA’s recordkeeping of full U.S. Junior results starts in 2002).
Florida signee Jackson Ormond, who also qualified for last month’s U.S. Open, shot 7 over and was among the MCs.
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