31 Jul 2024 | Amateur golf |
Cameron Smith Scholarship winners named
by Martin Blake
Elite amateurs Kayun Mudadana and Wes Hinton have won the Cameron Smith Scholarships for 2024, giving them priceless time with the 2022 Open Champion at his home in the United States.
Sydney’s Mudadana, 18, was runner-up in the Australian Boys Amateur this year and is the reigning club champion at New South Wales Golf Club.
Hinton, also 18, was sixth at the Australian Boys Amateur in 2024, was top-10 in both the past two years, and won the 2023 club championship at Keperra Country Golf Club. He is coached by Ji McBryde.
In addition to time with Smith at home in Jacksonville, Florida they will travel with him and attend the LIV Golf individual championship in Chicago this September, where he will be competing.
Hear from Kayun Mudadana about his scholarship (Video: Golf NSW)
The Cameron Smith Scholarship began in 2016 as a collaboration between major-championship winner Smith and Golf Australia as part of the Give Back program, where elite-level professional players repay some of their funding by helping out with the High Performance program.
Until 2023 it was restricted to elite Queensland amateurs, but last year it was extended to become a national scholarship.
The likes of Jed Morgan, Elvis Smylie, Louis Dobbelaar and Jeff Guan have all benefited from time with Smith and mentoring as part of the scholarship.
“The Cameron Smith Scholarship is an extremely valuable tool for our High Performance program,” said Golf Australia’s High Performance Director Tony Meyer.
“We’re eternally grateful to Cam that he has taken this project on and that he is so genuinely invested in it. Cam loves the notion of bringing players through and imparting his knowledge as well as showing the players a good time.
“All the players who’ve been to stay and practise with Cam in the US have let us know that they gleaned a hell of a lot from it. I have no doubt that Wes and Kayun are going to have a great time and pick up some really important learnings.”
Cameron Smith has won 12 professional tournaments around the world and in 2022 became the fifth Australian winner of the Open Championship behind Greg Norman, Kel Nagle, Peter Thomson and Ian Baker-Finch.
He has been ranked as high as No. 2 in the world.