Charlotte 49ers’ Matt Sharpstene comes close — but not close enough — at U.S. Amateur golf

Matt Sharpstene took a wide and successful detour between Morgantown and Charlotte last week.

Sharpstene, who’s joining the Charlotte 49ers’ golf program this fall after two successful seasons at West Virginia, made the semifinals of the U.S. Amateur, the country’s top amateur tournament, at Bandon Dunes in Oregon.

He eventually lost to Ollie Osborne 4 and 2 on Saturday, but not after what was a memorable week.

“It definitely was a great experience,” Sharpstene said. “I didn’t see that coming. I had been struggling this summer in some tournaments — I was coming off two missed cuts. But I still knew I could play. I just needed to show it. So I went in there with my mind refreshed, and I didn’t play with any expectations.”

Sharpstene barely qualified for the match-play portion of the tournament and was the 58th seed in the 64-player field. That set him up for a first-round matchup with John Augenstein, a star at Vanderbilt and the 2019 U.S. Am runner-up.

Sharpstene won 1 up and, with his dad Jeff serving as his caddie, off he went. He followed that with victories against Andrew Kozan (2 and 1), Davis Chatfield (4 and 3) and Phillip Barbaree (4 and 2) before meeting Southern Methodist’s Osborne in the semifinals.

His match against Osborne was marred by a one-stroke penalty he took when he noticed his ball move during his backswing on his second shot of the par-4 fifth hole. Sharpstene stopped in the middle of his swing and called a rules official over.

Since the ball moved while Sharpstene’s club was in the air, he had to take the penalty. The rules official, incidentally, was Daniela Lendl, the daughter of former tennis star Ivan Lendl.

“Stuff happens in golf,” said Sharpstene, who would lose the hole. “It just kind of happens at the wrong time sometimes. I didn’t let it faze me. I still could have potentially won.”

Sharpstene grew up in Charlotte and played two seasons at Hough High and was an Observer All-Mecklenburg selection as a sophomore before moving to Asheville, where he finished up at T.C. Roberson.

He went to West Virginia, where he was one of the Mountaineers’ top players for two seasons. As a freshman, he set a West Virginia program record of 64 at the Martin Downs Collegiate in Palm City, Florida.

Sharpstene said golf wasn’t a priority at West Virginia and that — along with the weather — played a major part in his decision to transfer to Charlotte, where he’ll have two seasons of eligibility remaining.

“Sports there are really good, but it’s also really cold up there,” Sharpstene said. “They didn’t have a good practice facility. Sometimes we’d come home from a tournament in Florida or Hawaii and I might have been struggling. We’d get back to campus and there’d be snow on the ground and it was hard to get the practice that I needed.”

Sharpstene, incidentally, hasn’t struggled all the time this summer. He shot a course record 64 on Pinehurst No. 4 during the North and South Amateur in June (he would eventually lose in match play in the round of 32).

He’s already good friends with 49ers players Ben Woodruff (a former teammate at Hough) and Carson Ownbey (who played at Christ School in Candler, near Asheville). He’s also gotten to know John Gough, Charlotte’s top player who also made the match play portion of the U.S. Am last week.

“Knowing those guys is going to help Matt with the transition,” 49ers coach Ryan Cabbage said. “He’ll slide right in. On the golf course, he’s going to push (Gough) and John will push him. Any time you bring in a player of that caliber, it makes everybody better. We all want as much competition as we possibly can within the team, because that causes everybody to get better.”

Other 49ers in U.S. Amateur

Charlotte was one of 12 men’s college programs to have multiple players reach the match-play portion of the U.S. Amateur. Gough lost in the round of 64 on the 19th hole to Segundo Oliva Pinto, a former UNC Wilmington player who transferred to Arkansas.

The 49ers’ Cecilie Finne-Ipsen and Siarra Stout played in the women’s tournament in Rockville, Maryland. Finne-Ipsen, who’s from Denmark, made it to the round of 32, where she lost to Stanford freshman Rachel Heck.

The men’s tournament came close to having an all-Carolinas final. In the semifinal opposite the Sharpstene-Osborne match, Concord’s Aman Gupta, who plays at Oklahoma State, lost to eventual champion Tyler Strafaci of Georgia Tech 1 down.

This story was originally published August 18, 2020 at 4:35 PM.