KIMBERLEY — For the past two weeks, Austin Krahn has played a game of ‘catch me if you can’ with his fellow competitors. No one caught him last week when the 17-year-old from Chrtistina Lake went wire-to-wire to win his second straight B.C. Junior Boys Championship.
And it’s the same story this week through three rounds of the B.C. Amateur Championship at Bootleg Gap.
Krahn had a share of the lead after the first two rounds and now has it to himself heading into Friday’s final round. He fired a three-under 68 in the third round and has a one-shot lead over Surrey’s Bailey Bjornson.
Krahn is happy to have the lead, but was frustrated by his finish. After striping a drive down the middle of the fairway on the difficult par 4 18th hole, Krahn made his only bogey of the day when he pulled his nine-iron approach shot short into a greenside bunker.
“It was a tough finish,” he said. “I hit a great shot into 16 that landed about two feet short of the pin and spun back to about 20 feet. I hit a great shot on 17 to about six feet and missed the putt and then on 18 put my drive right down the middle and my nine-iron plugged in the bunker and left me with a terrible lie. So it was a tough finish, but sometimes it’s the way it goes. I had a clean card up until then and would have liked to have kept it clean.”
Krahn feels like his ball-striking is where he wants it to be. He simply has not been converting as many of his opportunities as he would like. “I am just not making many putts out there. But any day you can come out here and feel like you didn’t play your best and still have the lead is always good. It just sets you up so you feel like maybe you can tear it up the next day.”
Bjornson trailed by three shots when he stepped up to the 17th tee. But a birdie there cut the lead to two and he picked up another shot when Krahn bogeyed 18. “That’s a good spot to be going into the last round,” said Bjornson, who played collegiate golf at Simon Fraser University and is heading to South Carolina for his final year of eligibility.
“I hit a nice sand wedge in there on 17 and it spun back close and worked out just the way my caddie and I had planned.” Bjornson matched Krahn’s three-under 68 in the third round. He had five birdies and three bogeys.
“There’s always a couple of shots you’d like to have back, but overall I felt like I bounced back pretty well today from my mistakes,” he said.
Kelowna’s Andrew Rouble shares third place with Dustin Franko of Delta at six-under par. Rouble fired a six-under 66 that included an eagle on the par 4 9th hole where the tee had been moved up to play about 277 yards. Franko closed his round with the only birdie made on the long par 4 18th hole on Thursday.
Three players — Nasheel Kassam of Vancouver, Denby Carswell of Burnaby and Ryan Vest of Vernon — are tied for fifth at five-under par.
Richmond’s Michael Crisologo shot the low round of the day, a six-under 65, and moved up 32 spots on the leaderboard to sit in a tie for 12th at two-under par.
The top three finishers this week will represent British Columbia in the Willingdon Cup inter-provincial team competition at the Canadian Men’s Amateur Championship, which goes July 28-31 at Royal Ottawa Golf Club in Gatineau, Que. British Columbia won last year’s Willingdon Cup for the first time since 2015.
A two-man better-ball competition is also being contested this week. The team of Austin Krahn and partner Manpreet Lahl of Nanaimo are tied with the duo of Hudson LaFayette of North Vancouver and Mackenzie Bickell of Richmond at 20-under.
Click HERE for complete scoring from the 3rd round of the B.C. Amateur