Past Champions of the Dustin Johnson World Junior Golf Championship: Where Are They Now?
Did you know that among college golf’s best current players, three of the top four men’s golfers have competed in the Dustin Johnson World Junior Golf Championship? They actually squared off against each other in the 2018 event, with one of them emerging victorious – and in the process also defeating a current pro with multiple PGA TOUR event appearances already to his credit.
There may be no better snapshot of just how good the playing field has become at the Dustin Johnson World Junior than from a quick glance at what the event’s past winners have since achieved.
Where are they now?
Boys’ Division
• 2020 – Tyler Wilkes, currently playing at the University of Florida.
• 2019 – Akshay Bhatia, who after competing for the victorious United States team in the 2019 Walker Cup bypassed college golf to turn professional. He has made 12 PGA TOUR event appearances since, making the cut in three out of five 2021 season events. Bhatia recorded a top-10 finish at the Safeway Open and a T30 showing at the 2021 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, where he fired a first-round 64 and became one of only seven golfers since 1983 to hit all 18 greens in regulation at Pebble Beach in a single round – either during the annual AT&T, or at one of the four U.S. Opens held there in that time span.
• 2018 – Michael Brennan, who as a freshman this year at Wake Forest has already ascended to the No. 3 position in Golfstat’s NCAA Men’s Division I Players Ranking. In 2018, Brennan competed in the Dustin Johnson World Junior against Golfstat’s current Men’s Division I No. 2 (Jacob Bridgeman, a sophomore at Clemson) and No. 4 (David Puig, a sophomore at Arizona State). And with 230 yards to the pin on the World Junior’s final hole at TPC Myrtle Beach’s par-5 18th, Brennan hit the event’s most memorable shot to date – striping a 4-iron to within 20 feet, then calmly sinking the eagle putt to defeat playing partner Bhatia by two strokes.
• 2017 – Trent Phillips, a sophomore at the University of Georgia who is currently Golfstat’s 18th ranked Division I men’s golfer.
• 2016 – Blake Taylor, who went on to compete for four years at East Carolina University and as a senior led the Pirates with a strokes per round average of 71.75, the second-lowest single-season average in ECU history.
Girls’ Division
• 2020 – Taylor Roberts, currently playing as a freshman at Florida State University and ranked No. 140 in Golfstat’s NCAA Women’s Division I Players Ranking.
• 2018-2019 – Alexa Pano, the event’s lone two-time champion, who after her most recent World Junior victory in 2019 became the youngest player in the inaugural Augusta National Women’s Amateur. She also qualified for the U.S. Women’s Open, the youngest golfer that year, and played for the winning team in the 2019 Junior Solheim Cup.
• 2017 – Skylar Thompson, who began her collegiate career at South Carolina in the fall of 2018 before transferring to Ohio State. As a Buckeye Thompson has excelled both on the course and in the classroom, where in 2020 she earned WCGA All-American Scholar, OSU Scholar-Athlete and Academic All-Big Ten honors in 2020.
• 2016 – Delaney Shah, who went on to a successful college career at Louisville where she became a three-time WGCA All-American Scholar and recorded a career scoring average of 76.11 that ranks 12th all-time in program history.
