Ken Borland

PORT EDWARD (KwaZulu-Natal) – Neelesh Sitlu very nearly retired injured after the first round of the Vodacom Origins of Golf Wild Coast Pro-Am, but the 16-handicapper from Mount Edgecombe Estate bravely soldiered on in the second round on Thursday and ended up winning the competition alongside professional Pierre Pellegrin.

Sitlu and Pellegrin, along with Pride Sembo who was the professional partner in the first round, notched 87 points, two points more than the team of Albert Venter, James Pennington and amateur Marvela Sithole.

Sitlu only started playing golf two years ago and was appearing in his first pro-am, and his victory was even more remarkable considering his injury.

“On the first day I was trying to out-drive the pros from our forward tees, but I ended up pulling or tearing something in my right arm. I barely slept, I was buying ice for my arm, using towels soaked in hot water and I even called my Dad, who is a GP, and my cousin, who is a physio, for advice.

“This morning I could barely move my arm, but then one of the pros said I shouldn’t be using my right arm much anyway, I should be pulling with my left arm. So I focused on that and I had my best round ever, my lowest score,” Sitlu revealed.

The business analyst and software developer in the health services sector had nothing but praise for professional partners Sembo and Pellegrin, and they in turn said Sitlu was the perfect gentleman.

“Playing in my first pro-am, I was quite nervous because I didn’t really know how you are meant to play with a professional. But they were so calm and welcoming, it was like playing with a friend, just a 100 times better golfer! They are so disciplined and they were both exactly what you’d imagine a pro to be,” Sitlu said.

“He was very fun to play with, a very good partner,” Pellegrin said of Sitlu. “It was a good day in an amazing place, we combined perfectly together and to win was just a bonus. Our job as pros is to make the amateurs happy, and I really enjoy playing in pro-ams because you meet new people from around the country and make connections.

“I’m always grateful to play in a pro-am because it’s a way of thanking the sponsors, who make it possible for us to play golf,” Pellegrin said.

The Mauritian is playing his second full season on the Sunshine Tour and says the pivotal difference as he finds his feet on the prestigious tour that is continually churning out fresh generations of bright Southern African talent, is that he knows what to expect.

“I managed to retain my card after my first season and now I know what to expect, especially in terms of how I manage external things like travel and accommodation, I’m doing that much better now.

“I’m very happy with where my golf is at, I’m doing okay, although any golfer always feels they can do better. I’ve put in a lot of hard work and I played well in the pro-am, but it will be a tougher set-up for the tournament proper.

“I’ve played a couple of times at the Wild Coast Sun Country Club and it is in great condition. But this course is my nemesis, I haven’t had my best results here. You’ve got to know how to score around here and I’m always up for the challenge. Plus I can take some confidence from winning the pro-am,” Pellegrin said.

Another season of the Women’s Premier Division came to an end last weekend with the Bulls Daisies securing back-to-back titles, and the attention in local ladies rugby will now pivot to the newly-announced Super League professional franchise competition recently announced by SA Rugby.

While the Super League would be a boost for the growth of high-performance women’s rugby in South Africa, there are still pivotal questions around when it will start and how it will work, especially in terms of player contracting.

SA Rugby said they intend to contract 150 women players for the new competition, with the provincial unions being invited to submit proposals for inclusion of a franchise in the new Super League.

But the Bulls, who made a groundbreaking move to being fully professional last year, already have 35 players contracted and the vast majority of those will be offered new contracts on September 1.

SA Rugby want the Super League to begin in early 2025 and have said the “centrally contacted players will be shared out among the teams”. Unless the 150 given SA Rugby contracts don’t include any Bulls players, there is going to be a tug-of-war over the services of the players who have dominated the Women’s Premier Division over the last two seasons.

“We will entrench our players,” Thando Manana, the executive in charge of women’s rugby for the Blue Bulls Company, told Rapport. “SA Rugby say they are going to contract 150 players and although it is good to have this innovation, we need to tread carefully in our rush to get this Super League underway. There’s definitely going to be a timing issue if they want to start in January.

“I love anything that develops the game, but we can’t wait for all the details to come out, we will be renewing contracts for the new cycle that starts on September 1, and some of those will be extended to two or three years. We’re not looking at what others do, we will be pushing forward in the months ahead to take women’s rugby to another level,” Manana said.

Blue Bulls Rugby Union president Willem Strauss said he would rather reserve comment on the Super League until they have more information.

“I don’t know much about it, but anything that takes women’s rugby to the next level, I will support. But I need to know the details about the Super League, hopefully it aligns commercially with what we have done with such success over the last two years.

“As a board, we are very happy with what we have achieved in women’s rugby. It was a brave step to go professional in the women’s game because the financial impact was negative. But once we started performing then we started to attract commercial partners.

“Our team has improved a helluva lot and this year we had to use a lot of club players because of national team call-ups. But the number of women taking up the game has expanded by 30% per year, which is fantastic because it shows that going professional is sustainable. There are more and more women’s teams joining the league, as well as youth clubs, which shows that the ecosystem is healthy.

“Plus the Bulls Daisies bring a new audience to Loftus Versfeld which is very important, it’s not a traditional Pretoria crowd. The Bulls Daisies have certainly added value to our brand of excellence and they are inspiring the next generation of women’s stars,” Strauss told Rapport.

Lynne Cantwell, SA Rugby’s High Performance Manager for women’s rugby, praised the Bulls for their top-class programme and said the aim of the Super League was to get the rest of the country’s players to that level of excellence.

“The goal of the competition is to make that leap into where the performance standards align. Once we get there, all the teams will be more competitive and the women’s tournament will go down to the wire, we want to get to the situation where you never know who is going to win.

“The Bulls took that leap two years ago and have led the way, and we’ve seen their big performance leap. You have to give credit to Western Province, and the fact that they pushed the Bulls in the final is testament to their pipeline. There are great signs of growth, they are swelling their player numbers and Boland have done this as well.

“The goal is to have all our premier teams to be like the Bulls, and then that will make for a strong national team. The Super League will be performance-driven, and hopefully that means teams can ask more of sponsors, they can pitch higher because of increased visibility. That will drive game standards and allow teams to employ high-quality coaches, physios, medics and strength-and-conditioning coaches,” Cantwell told Rapport.

The former Ireland star envisages a league with four or five teams, with each side playing eight to 10 matches. The Super League will not replace the Premier Division because it will be played at a different time of year.

Cantwell is keen on a draft system to allocate the contracted players, but she acknowledges the Bulls issue will need to be resolved.

“The Bulls have a significant number of our top players and it will need to be a gradual approach in terms of how we spread the top players around. The Super League will be our top-end competition, but it will take a couple of years for everything to be aligned.

“We want the other teams to have programmes that are the equivalent of the Bulls. With SA Rugby funding the player contracts, there won’t be as much pooling of players at a single union because we can say where they must play,” Cantwell said.

EDENVALE, Gauteng – Your first professional win is always a momentous occasion, and even for someone who has achieved as much as Cara Gorlei has, it was a special day at Glendower Golf Club on Friday as she claimed the Jabra Ladies Classic title for her maiden triumph.

In the four years that Gorlei has been a pro, she had racked up 11 top-10 finishes and earned more than R600 000 in prizemoney and has also qualified for the Ladies European Tour, before sealing the deal and getting her hands on the trophy by a stroke at Glendower on Friday.

Gorlei was lying second, two shots behind at the start of the final round, and she kept herself in the conversation throughout, even as Stacy Bregman, Moa Folke, Gabriella Cowley and Lisa Pettersson all made a charge, while overnight leader Maiken Bing Paulsen also stayed in contention.

A bogey at the par-three sixth meant the 28-year-old Gorlei was level-par for her round. But she immediately followed that up with birdies on the seventh and eighth holes. Others faltered as Gorlei reached the turn and the pressure of the situation brought out the best in the Capetonian as she was inspired on the back nine. Three birdies in four holes from the 11^th put her in front and she reached the last hole with a two-shot lead, making her bogey on the 18^th all the more palatable.

She still posted her third successive 68 to finish on 12-under-par, one ahead of Pettersson, who shot an outstanding 67 to finish on 11-under.

“I was trying not to think about the lead, until the 11^th, when I started to get a bit nervous. My first win started to play on my mind a little bit and then on 13 I saw on a leaderboard that Lisa Pettersson was right up there with me,” Gorlei said.

“But it just made me focus harder because I realised it was not done yet. I knew I was playing well enough and I just stuck to my routines. Obviously it’s awesome to get the win done and I am really happy that I stayed level-headed.

“I’ve been in two playoffs and lost them both, so it was nice to get the monkey off my back without having to go to another playoff. I have my first pro win and now I can start going,” Gorlei beamed.

In a sign of her mental maturity, Gorlei realised that she may not have had her A-game with her on Friday, so she settled into a prudent approach.

“I struggled a bit off the tee today, which made it quite tough. My game was not in the right place for me to play aggressively; I enjoy playing that way, I like to chase and sneak in from behind, but today I was pretty conservative.

“Different parts of my game showed up at different times. At times my putting really saved me, down the stretch my irons were pretty solid, but they weren’t on the front nine. So it was a little bit of everything that came together,” Gorlei said.

While Pettersson’s 67 was bogey-free as she charged up the leaderboard from four shots off the pace, the other contenders made costly errors.

Folke reached the turn in four-under and was leading, but three bogeys in a row from the 11^th meant her challenge faded and the Swede finished fourth on nine-under-par after a 69.

Bregman also went through the front nine in 32, but bogeys on the par-four 11^th and par-three 14^th saw her fall four strokes short in a tie for fifth on eight-under.

Paulsen, who led after the first and second rounds, was level-par on Friday through eight holes, but she then dropped four strokes to also finish on eight-under, alongside Bregman and Nina Pegova (69).

Cowley was five-under through 13 holes, but then a bogey at the par-five 15^th saw her end in third place on 10-under-par.

Talented 19-year-old golfer Kiera Floyd is surely not far from her breakthrough Sunshine Ladies Tour victory given her recent form, and this week’s Absa Ladies Invitational being played at her home course of Serengeti Estates may just give her that extra edge that leads her to her first professional title.

Floyd has finished in the top-10 of her last two events, the Fidelity ADT Ladies Challenge and the Standard Bank Ladies Open, while she also contended strongly in the Dimension Data Ladies Pro-Am at Fancourt, before shooting 84 in the final round to finish tied-15^th.

And the good news for her is that the Serengeti layout is just her cup of tea. Floyd’s length and accuracy off the tee should see her prosper on the 5688m course.

“I’ve been playing Serengeti for many years and I’m really looking forward to this tournament. Serengeti has a lot of signature holes, which can make it a make-or-break situation. Just none of the holes are the same, there’s always something different thrown at you and usually a bunker in the way too,” Floyd says.

“It’s not a very open course, but it all depends on where you play it off the tee. It’s definitely not the same as the other courses we’ve played this season, for me it is special, I really like the layout and it has its own way of playing it.

“I’m feeling really confident, I’m playing really nicely at the moment. The course is a bit longer, which suits me because I am a long hitter. But I still have to play well, I can’t take things for granted just because it is my home course,” Floyd says.

The second-year pro has always quickly conquered the different levels of the game, and her maiden Sunshine Ladies Tour win cannot be far away judging by her previous achievements. Floyd won the Benoni Country Club Ladies Championship aged nine, she finished third in the Sunshine Ladies Tour’s Jabra Classic aged 14, and she won the South African Women’s Strokeplay Championship in 2022 before turning professional at the beginning of last year. She has already racked up six top-10 finishes on tour.

But on a course with so many different layers of difficulty, she has identified staying calm during the inevitable tough times as the key element of her game that needs to improve for her to make that next step into the winner’s circle as a professional.

“I’ve struggled a bit in the past events with keeping my head up if I make a bogey or a hole does not go well. I need to be more consistent, put both nines together. You need that consistency so if you start on a roll then you can keep it going. I need to stay patient to get the ‘W’, just work my way through the course and whatever happens, happens,” Floyd said.

Her contemporary Gabrielle Venter won the Standard Bank Ladies Open at Royal Cape Golf Club three weeks ago, giving Floyd a lot of confidence she can make it back-to-back South African winners when the Absa Ladies Invitational gets underway at Serengeti on Thursday.

But there will be other winners providing a stiff challenge in the R1.2 million event as well, such as seasoned champion Lee-Anne Pace, Germany’s Helen Kreuzer and India’s Tvesa Malik, already winners on tour this season, as well as strong South African challengers such as Stacy Bregman, Nicole Garcia and Cara Gorlei, and the consistent Alexandra Swayne from the U.S. Virgin Islands, who has not finished outside the top-14 yet this campaign.