Englishman Sam Hutsby is the next in our ‘six faces to follow’ series for the 2011 Challenge Tour season…
In 2009 Sam Hutsby was the name on everyone’s lips. He was the joint leading points scorer for Great Britain and Ireland in the Walker Cup, reached the final of the British Amateur Championship, where he lost to an Italian youngster by the name of Matteo Manassero, and he came second at the Qualifying School Final Stage to earn his first European Tour card.
The Hampshire player was being tipped to secure his first professional victory in 2010, but by the end of that year no one was envying his position in the unlucky 118th spot in The Race to Dubai, one place away from retaining his card for 2011.
This season the 22 year old finds himself on the Challenge Tour, although he will still be exempt for roughly 15 European Tour events throughout the year.
Instead of a backward step, however, the Challenge Tour will provide the chance to build on the foundations he has laid in professional golf, and will allow him to progress his game as players such as Edoardo Molinari, one of the Challenge Tour’s greatest success stories, have done in the past.
The Italian lost his card in 2008, won the Challenge Tour Rankings in 2009 and in 2010 was part of Europe’s victorious Ryder Cup team and the winner of two European Tour titles.
Hutsby started the 2010 season promisingly, making the cut in his first four appearances and then finishing tied 12th at the Open de Andalucia de Golf having led at the halfway stage. He made the cut in 19 of the 27 events he played, so while his rookie season may not have met his own goals, it was far from disastrous.
On only his second professional appearance Hutsby came tied eighth at the CASTELLO MASTERS Costa Azahar and in his next event he finished tied 14th at the Barclays Singapore Open.
Although he can clearly mix it on The European Tour and was unlucky not to have automatically kept his card, last year’s events may well have knocked Hutsby’s confidence, and a spell on the Challenge Tour is the perfect chance to regroup and bounce back with fresh impetus.
He played three of the four events in South Africa at the start of the season and only made the cut in one, the Africa Open, where he finished 51st. In playing the Joburg Open, where he was four shots off making the cut, he missed the opening event of the Challenge Tour season, the Gujarat Kensville Challenge in India.
Hutsby will be faced with this decision throughout the season: whether to commit fully to the Challenge Tour schedule or whether to miss an event – and therefore dent his chances of finishing in the top 20 in the Rankings – and play in the European Tour events to which he will gain entry through his category, in the hope he will earn enough money from those to regain his card through The Race to Dubai.
His compatriot Oliver Fisher was in a similar situation last year. Having lost his card at the end of 2009, Fisher finished in the top ten in four consecutive European Tour events early in the season and decided the windfall would significantly help him regain his card. It proved a shrewd choice as the 22 year old made enough money from tournaments from which he was exempt or to which he received a sponsor’s invitation to finish 81st in The Race to Dubai.
Whatever Hutsby decides, he will be a player to watch in 2011, and once he recovers from his early season dip, will no doubt be a force on the Challenge Tour. After all, as the old adage goes: form is temporary, class is permanent.
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