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Wake Golfer Kupcho's Historic Win Puts Her In National Spotlight

Jennifer Kupcho kisses the trophy after winning the inaugural Augusta National Women's Amateur Saturday. Image courtesy of Wake Forest University Athletic Department.

Wake Forest golfer Jennifer Kupcho won last year's NCAA Championship, but that spotlight was nothing like what she's seen since winning the first woman's tournament on a course not known for gender equity.

Fighting through a migraine headache that blurred her vision, Kupcho shot a final round 67 to win the first Augusta National Women's Amateur, playing on the same course as The Masters Tournament.

Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia long opposed having women as members and didn't start admitting them until 2012, so being the first woman to win a tournament on the course brought Kupcho instant fame.  

The media rounds on Monday ran the gamut from NBC's TODAY to The Tonight Show, with interviews for major sports shows and publications in between.

Kupcho is the reigning NCAA Division I champion and currently is the number one ranked amateur woman in the world. She returns to action next week for the ACC Tournament in Greensboro.

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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