There’s been lots of talk about amateur golf in Canada recently (see Bob Weeks here and Ian Andrew for more).
Interestingly, there’s been little written about the new World Amateur Ranking, that has just become official, and how it relates to Canada.
Here is the Canadian list. Certainly Canada has had a lot of amateurs turn pro recently (Andrew Parr, Richard Scott, others), but it must still be disappointing to see only two Canadians ranked among the Top 200 in the world. I’m sure this is what the new RCGA program is designed to address, but there will be increasing pressure on them to deliver now that there’s a way of tracking the best amateurs in the world.
How accurate are these rankings? It seems to me that it favours Europeans over North Americans – only three of the top 10 are Americans which seems kind of low.
The US Am is generally regarded to be the top amateur tournament in the world and Canadians have done very well in this event for the last few years. I would look at that as the indication of the state of Canadian amateur golf rather than these rankings.