Former US Women’s Open champion Paula Creamer will be hoping history repeats itself when she tees up in the Ricoh Women’s British Open Final Qualifier at St Annes Old Links this Monday (July 30th).

12 months ago, the 32-year-old ten-time LPGA Tour champion, carded a four under par 68 to come through Final Qualifying at the Castle Course, St Andrews, and she is bidding to extend a sequence which has seen her play in the championship every year since 2005 when she finished tied-third behind Jeong Jang and Michelle Wie at Royal Birkdale.

Creamer, who has played on seven US Solheim Cup teams, is joined in the field by compatriot Morgan Pressel, who won the 2007 Kraft Nabisco Championship, a result which made her the youngest-ever winner of a modern women’s Major, at the age of just 18 years, four months and 20 days, as well as by another former US Solheim Cup player, Christina Kim, and Cheyenne Woods, the niece of Tiger Woods.

There is also a strong presence from the Ladies European Tour including Scottish-based American Beth Allen, who as recently as 2016 topped the Tour’s Order of Merit and won its Players’ Player of the Year having claimed two victories and recorded a further six top-ten finishes during the season. Other leading LET players taking part include England’s Hannah Burke and Felicity Johnson, Spain’s Nuria Iturrioz and Beatrice Recari, France’s Justine Dreyer and Scottish duo Carly Booth and Gemma Dryburgh.

Austrian, Isabella Holpfer, heads a group of 17 amateurs in the Final Qualifying field after topping the leaderboard at the Ricoh Women’s British Open Pre-Qualifier at Hankley Common.
Holpfer, from the Reiters club in Bad Tatzmannsdorf, who won the recent Slovenian International Amateur, carded a five under par 67 to finish two shots ahead of Scotland’s Vikki Laing and Sweden’s My Leander, who made the cut as an amateur at last year’s championship at Kingsbarns.

English amateur, Sophie Newlove, was also among the 25 qualifiers at Hankley Common and she now travels to the north west of England to take up her place alongside the likes of England’s India Clyburn, Lily May Humphreys, Bel Wardle and Hollie Muse, Scotland’s Chloe Goadby, Connie Jaffrey and Shannon McWilliam, Sweden’s Linn Grant, Frida Kinhult, Amanda Linner and Maja Stark and France’s Mathilde Claisse who were all exempt from Pre-Qualifying.

Grant, Kinhult, Linner and Stark were part of the Swedish team which beat France in the final of the recent European Ladies’ Team Championship at Murhof in Austria. Earlier in the season, Grant, the 2017 Helen Holm Scottish Open and British Women’s Stroke Play champion, also headed the field at the US Women’s Open International Qualifier at Buckinghamshire Golf Club and went on to play all four rounds in the championship itself at Shoal Creek.