Peter Williams: Amateur teams easy to pick for world champs

The New Zealand men's and women's line-ups for the world amateur teams championships in South Africa in October will be named on Tuesday week. But, with only three in each side, it's obvious who the players will be.

The men's team for the Eisenhower Trophy will surely be Josh Geary, Mark Purser and James Gill, while Sharon Ahn, Sarah Nicholson and Natasha Krishna are certain to play for the Espirito Santo Trophy. There haven't been such clear cut selections in years.

The call on the men's team could have been extremely difficult had Danny Lee been eligible. The Rotorua 16-year-old will make his New Zealand debut for the junior team in the Clare Higson Trophy against Australia in Hamilton at the end of September. For that event, players need just New Zealand residency. Lee has that but, as yet, not the citizenship required for the Eisenhower Trophy. As the first New Zealander to play in the US Amateur since 1999, (he finished 66th out of 310 in the qualifying rounds, missing the matchplay by one shot), Lee was a step ahead of Geary and Purser, who failed to qualify for the world's most prestigious amateur event.

Gill's wins in the Waikato Winter Strokeplay and the Bay of Plenty Open have taken him to the top of the country's amateur rankings, based on stroke average, ahead of Geary, Lee and Purser.

Gill's currently playing the first tournament of an overseas campaign in Singapore, which will be followed by the World University Games in Italy, the Italian and Greek Amateurs and the Federal Open in Australia.

The Espirito Santo team will be anchored by Lower Hutt's Nicholson. Like Geary, she's a veteran of the 2004 world championships but her team-mates are both teenagers. Ahn turns 16 in December while Krishna, who left last week for a scholarship at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas (UNLV), is just 17.

Krishna's likely inclusion continues a welcome trend - selecting players for national representation from US colleges. In 2004, the University of California's Claire Drury was the best of the women's team, finishing six over for the four rounds as the team tied for ninth out of 48 teams. For too long, selectors either ignored the claims of players on scholarships or did not work hard enough to secure releases from their colleges.

The Eisenhower and Espirito Santo are increasingly dominated by players on college scholarships, no matter which country they play for. In 2004, a Canadian and Paraguayan were the top individuals at the women's championship while Ryan Moore, from Krishna's UNLV, was the best Eisenhower player.

There is one sideshow to the naming of these teams. New Zealand Golf made a public statement that all six players will be at the Taranaki Open in the last week of September. James Gill isn't due back till October 3. Krishna appears to have been excused but Gill has been told that if selected, he must come back early to play in New Plymouth. But that return will be at his own expense, cancelling non-refundable airfares and hotel bookings.

Understandably he's far from happy with what he sees as overbearing administration distracting him in the lead-up to a very significant event.