The ANWA’s rare gift? You can see it on display in its most loaded team

Anne Walker tries to catch herself before it comes out — but it always does.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, the Stanford women’s golf coach has a front-row seat to one of, if not the most competitive rounds in the women’s game, where her loaded Cardinal team plays against each other to determine the top five players for the upcoming tournament.

“I’m finding myself audibly saying, ‘Wow,’ at some of the shots they hit,” Walker told GOLF. “Literally, I’ll be standing there, and it comes out of my mouth. I’m like, ‘Wow.’ And then I catch myself, and I’m like, ‘Dude, you can’t be the old lady on the tee box like, ‘Oh, you hit it so far!’

“I don’t think of [the practice rounds] as fun, I think of them as part of the process, and it’s ingrained in who we are at Stanford. Just getting to see these guys play golf up close all the time is so cool.”

That’s a good problem for a coach to have, and one that encapsulates the powerhouse Walker has built in Palo Alto. She recruits top talents who buy into the Stanford process and fit the team culture that is the foundation of what she has constructed in the Bay Area. The Cardinal program stands on a few key tenets: love, trust, joy and, perhaps most of all, competition. It’s something Walker’s current team has embraced, and it’s why she has to catch herself as she watches what might be her most talented unit yet feed off one another as they compete for a spot in that week’s starting five.

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But this week will be different for Walker. This week, that won’t be a problem. This week, at the most famous golf course in the world, she’ll watch as her five stars — or five number ones as she calls them — arrive at Augusta National to compete in the 2026 Augusta National Women’s Amateur.

Megha Ganne, who won the U.S. Women’s Amateur Championship last summer, will return for her sixth ANWA. Paula Martin Sampedro, who won the British Amateur and Ladies European Amateur last summer, will play in her third, as will Andrea Revuelta and Kelly Xu. Meja Ortengren will make her second trip to Augusta National. Sampedro is the No. 2-ranked player in the Women’s Amateur Golf Rankings. Revuelta is No. 3, Ortengren No. 5, Ganne No. 6 and Xu is No. 20.

“I think the cohesiveness is really unique,” Walker said of the five Cardinal that will head to Augusta National. “You are the product of the people you spend the most time with in life. You’re going to end up emulating their habits. You’re going to be influenced by their behaviors. We just can’t help that that’s just us human beings, the community that we’re in. And so just showing up every day with your best energy and emotional state, you automatically are influencing others, and they’re influencing you, and so even without having to think about it, they’re just on a continuum of improvement and progress just by being with one another.”

This stacked Cardinal team, whose average WAGR ranking is 7.2, has a rare bond that Walker hasn’t experienced in her 13 years at Stanford. All of her teams are close, yes, but this group is different. Sampedro and Revuelta grew up together in Spain. Ganne and Xu have played together on Junior Solheim Cup teams. Ortengren and Nora Sundberg, a sophomore on the team who won’t play at ANWA, grew up together in Sweden. The bonds are everywhere, creating a tight-knit group that is the definition of a collective in a normally individual sport. It has created a comfort level that serves as a launching pad to push them further, higher.

It’s a team overflowing with talent. Walker describes Sampedro as “the little engine that could.” A brilliant player whose focus, determination to get better and love for the game shine through in how she attacks her daily work. Xu, a senior, is the definition of a coach’s dream. “She wants the truth,” Walker said of Xu. “She’s the first to say, I don’t know what I don’t know, and I’m going to go seek the answers.”

Then there’s Ganne, whose impact on the Stanford golf program will be felt long after she’s gone. It’s a void that is already apparent even before she’s closed the book on her outstanding collegiate career.

“She’s gonna leave such a huge hole in our program, because she’s such a presence,” Walker said of Ganne. “She’s such a presence that not only will her departure be felt within our program, it’s also going to be felt within our men’s program. So Stanford golf as a whole, and I don’t think we’ve ever said that about any player, male or female, but that’s the development of Megha Ganne.”

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This isn’t the first time the Cardinal have sent five to the famed grounds of Augusta National to compete in what has quickly become a pinnacle event in the women’s amateur game. Truth be told, since the ANWA began, Augusta National’s color for the week has been Cardinal Red, instead of its traditional green and gold. Rose Zhang is the only Cardinal to win the event, but Stanford has been omnipresent at Augusta National since 2019, deeply intertwined in the nascent event’s DNA.

And yet, the 2026 group is the one that perfectly encapsulates the excellence of the Stanford women’s program, the greater importance of an event still in its infancy and the growing connection between the two.

“I don’t take it lightly, and I know how special it is, and I know what a privilege it is to have this spotlight for all of us playing this tournament,” Ganne said at last year’s ANWA. “I keep that in mind. Maybe if a shot doesn’t go my way, I try to hold the bigger perspective.

“I think it’s the most exciting week in amateur golf, men’s or women’s, period, in my opinion,” Ganne said. “I think everyone in golf knows about it. They might not know about certain other tournaments, but when this one’s happening, people tune in. It just draws so much attention in the best way, and these women carry themselves in such a great way. I’m really excited to see where the tournament goes, although I don’t think it can get that much better than it is now.”

Added Revuelta: “Playing Augusta last year was like a dream come true for me. Everything there is just so special and magical that it makes you really want to like — it really made me want to push myself this year to come here and practice and do well in this tournament. I think for many young girls Augusta National is the motivation.”

Perhaps no one has a better grasp of Augusta National’s importance in growing the women’s amateur game than Xu. One look at her Stanford bio and you see how the brainchild of Alister MacKenzie and Bobby Jones shaped the Southern California native’s golf journey. At the bottom, it reads: First female champion at Augusta National (Inaugural Drive Chip Putt, age 7-9 group)

Kelly Xu and Augusta National have a bond. Every golfer has some imagined connection to Augusta National. It’s a driver in many golf journeys. But Xu’s is real and tangible. She feels it deeply.

“I’m just really so, just so blessed to have it feel kind of full circle, and have that have such a big part of my golf arc, the arc of my golf journey, almost like revolve around Augusta,” Xu told GOLF.

“I think that having that experience of the Drive, Chip and Putt is something that’s kind of made me understand at a very young age, like that this game is so much more than just competing for yourself. I guess being able to grasp like a deeper meaning of the game. Like, being able to understand, like, the history of the game, kind of made me realize that it’s more than a game.”

This will be Xu’s final appearance at the ANWA. But her time at a course that is both steeped in golf tradition and that has a history of excluding women and people of color has her seeing the bigger picture. Kelly Xu wants to win the Augusta National Women’s Amateur. But more importantly, she wants to be a driving force in getting young girls, girls who grew up like she did, into the game and have them dreaming big — believing that they, too, can walk the fairways of Augusta National and make themselves part of the club’s story.

“I want to show that it’s possible for other municipal kids to one day play at Augusta, one day you can play at this level — like this is who you can be. And I’m always striving to be that version of myself that my nine-year-old self would be proud of because I was not, you know, I was practicing at a municipal, and I was so lucky to have been able to encounter Augusta that early on. I think everything I do is kind of for that bigger dream and that bigger purpose.”

That dream and purpose are part of the promise of the ANWA, a tournament that can elevate and shine a spotlight on the women’s amateur game in a unique way.

The bigger gift of the ANWA isn’t yet known. But Anne Walker sees how great its impact can be down the road. As a young golfer in Scotland with aspiring professional dreams, she never saw Augusta National as part of her path. She watched the Masters, of course, but never envisioned herself on those hallowed grounds. That’s just not how the story went.

But the stars of her team have lived a different reality. They’ve been able to etch the most famous course in the world into the stars for themselves, trying to chase a win that would be as “much of a career highlight” as any major. If you want kids to dream big, you have to give them reason to believe that there’s a world in which those dreams can become more and that has to be the world they live in.

“These young kids, they don’t remember a time when Augusta wasn’t an option for them, and it’s the pinnacle of amateur golf,” Walker said. “And they get to, in their mind, picture themselves hitting the same shots that Scottie [Scheffler’s] about to hit, hitting the same shots that will be replayed of Tiger chipping in at 16. They get to dream at night about that, and that just spurs them on in their progress. So I don’t even know that we can wrap our arms around the influence or the impact the ANWA has had on women’s golf, because I think there’s still more to come. But I think they took the top end of the game and they creeped it higher, and they took the bottom end of the game, and they creeped it higher, everyone moved up, because now when they’re going to bed at night, they’re dreaming of hitting the shots that are so famous in the history of the sport. Now, we too can do that.”

This week at the ANWA, Anne Walker won’t have to stop herself from being “the old lady on the tee box” cheering. She’ll be free to go through all the emotions with her five ones as they chase their dreams and a spot in history on sacred golf grounds.

When the final putt drops, win or lose, they’ll have left their mark and left the women’s amateur game in a better spot than when they arrived. Next week at the Masters, fans will flood the merch tent in search of mementos of all shapes and sizes. But this week, the real gift comes with no price tag — and it can only be found on the course at Augusta National.