'HELEN HOLM' PRESSURE ON CURTIS
CUP PAIR, MICHELE AND BREANNE

By COLIN FARQUHARSON
Every British and Irish player in the field will be pulling out all the stops to finish ahead of Michele Thomson (McDonald Ellon) and Breanne Loucks (Wrexham) in the Helen Holm Scottish women's open amateur golf championship over Troon Portland and the Royal Troon links over the next three days (Friday to Sunday).
Nothing personal ... but Michele and Breanne are the only members in the interational field of the eight-strong GB&I team for the Curtis Cup match against the Americans over the Old Course, St Andrews at the end of May.
Michele and Breanne have both played well during the "close season" in foreign fields, so there is no reason for them to approach the first big event of the domestic women's amateur season with any degree of trepidation at all.
More pressure for 19-year-old Michele is that she and another youngster, Glasgow University student Pamela Pretswell, will have their scores counting for "Scotland" in the international team event which runs in conjunction with the 54-hole individual championship.
Mhairi McKay (1992), Lesley Nicholson (1999) and Heather Stirling (2002) are Scotland's only winners of the prestigious individual title over the past two decades but Heather MacRae and Jenna Wilson did win the team trophy for Scotland a couple of years ago.
English match-play champion Naomi Edwards (Ganton), who was a contender for a place in the Curtis Cup team, has withdrawn as have Sarah Faller (Galway), Rachel Connor (Manchester), Hermione Fitzgerald (Newmarket) and Corisande Lee (West Lancashire).
With so many high-class Continental players in the field, it is almost anybody's guess who will step up late Sunday afternoon to receive the trophy, a mounted golf club once used by the late, great Helen Holm, whom this tournament commemorates.
But one player they all have to beat is Sweden's Caroline Hedwall whose handicap of +6 makes her, on paper, the highest-rated female amateur golfer in Europe and probably the world.