Lilia Vu of UCLA, the top-ranked female golfer in the world, is among eight players selected to the United States team for the 40th Curtis Cup Match against Great Britain and Ireland on June 8-10 at Quaker Ridge Golf Club in Scarsdale, N.Y.
Vu, a junior from Fountain Valley who has claimed four victories for the second consecutive college season and also captured the 2016 Southern California Golf Association Women’s Amateur, is joined on the team by her Bruin teammate, Mariel Galdiano, a sophomore from Pearl City, Hawaii.
Other Californians on the team are Andrea Lee, a Stanford sophomore from Hermosa Beach who also played in the 2016 Curtis Cup, and Lucy Li of Redwood Shores, who becomes the first 15-year-old to make the team since Lexi Thompson in 2010.
Rounding out the team are Kristen Gillman, a sophomore at Alabama from Austin, Texas; Jennifer Kupcho, a junior at Wake Forest from Westminster, Colo.; Lauren Stephenson, a junior at Alabama from Lexington, S.C., and Sophia Schubert a senior at Texas from Oak Ridge, Tenn., who captured the 2017 U.S. Women’s Amateur Championship.
Virginia Derby Grimes, the 1998 U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur champion and a member of the victorious 1998, 2000 and 2006 Curtis Cup Teams, will serve as U.S. captain.
“It’s exciting to have the team announced and to start preparing for June,” Derby Grimes said. “I’ve had the opportunity to get to know many of these young women over the past few months, and I can tell you firsthand that they are not only remarkable players, but remarkable people who take representing the United States extremely seriously.
“We’re going to work hard over the next few weeks and give the GB&I Team all we’ve got.”
The United States has dominated the biennial Curtis Cup series by a 28-8-3 margin, but Great Britain and Ireland claimed an 11.5-8.5 victory at Dun Laoghaire Golf Club in Ireland in 2016, when Bronte Law of Great Britain and UCLA posted a 5-0 record.
The Curtis Cup Match consists of six foursomes (alternate-shot) matches, six four-ball matches and eight singles matches over three days.
