For the third year in a row the Auckland teenage golfer Lydia Ko has won the Mark H. McCormack Medal as the world's leading women's amateur player.
Ko earned the McCormack Medal after another excellent season in which she competed in four of golf's major championships and she tees off overnight as defending champion at the Canadian Women's Open in Edmonton, Alberta.
Ko made history this time last year when she beat the world's best professionals to become the youngest winner in the history of the LPGA Tour at the age of 15 as she won by three shots in Canada, and she missed out on a big winner's cheque that instead went to the now-world number one and second place getter Inbee Park of South Korea.
If she wins this year Ko will forgo a $364,000 cheque, but she's not worried about missing out on the money at this stage. She says as an amateur, it's not like she counts how much money she's not taking home every time she would've won some.
Ko admits there's more pressure on her this week as the defending champion, but she's loving being back in Canada, and wants to extend her streak of 23 professional tournaments without missing a cut.
Ko earned the McCormack Medal after another excellent season in which she competed in four of golf's major championships and several other events on the Ladies Tour.
The 16-year-old's best finish in a professional tournament was a tie for third in the Australian Women's Open while she finished joint 17th in the Wegmans LPGA Championship and shared 25th place in the Kraft Nabisco Championship.
The teenage star says the medal means a lot and to have won it three years in a row makes it more special.
She says winning last year's US Amateur was great as she wanted to win that championship so much and without winning it, she may not have been able to maintain her position.
England's Matthew Fitzpatrick won the men's McCormack medal after capping an outstanding season by winning the top amateur honours at the British Open, then becoming the first Englishman to clinch the US Amateur Championship in 102 years in Massachusetts.
The Mark H. McCormack Medals are named in honour of Mark McCormack, a pioneer and founder of the sports marketing industry who also created the world ranking system for professional golf. He died in 2003.
His International Management Group is widely known as the world's largest representative of sportsmen and sportswomen.
