WAGR Files: The WAGR Unicorn

The African Amateur Championship was conducted last week at Leopard Creek in South Africa.  The championship was won by Bryan Newman of South Africa, a 17-year-old junior and another name to add to the vaunted 2026 class.  The event was started by the R&A last year and the winner gets exemptions into the Open Championship, British Amateur, and Alfred Dunhill Championship.  That's quite a haul!  Kudos to the R&A for opening up global pathways into its top events and promoting competition across the world.

There's also one nice little perk to the African Amateur competitors: each gets a 20% kicker to their respective WAGR performance.

As we've proved out with our WAGR Power Estimator, the Power ranking is based on the WAGR rank of the ranked players (sorted from best player in the field to worst) coming into the event.  This methodology is consistently applied to produce the Power rating nearly every men's and women's amateur counting event over the last two years. As far as we can tell, there are only two of the nearly 13000 counting Amateur events that didn't use this calculation method for their Power rating:

There is a seldom-used Provision in the (scant-on-details) WAGR Rating Criteria that allows "the WAGR Committee, at its sole discretion, may choose to assist events in developing areas by modifying the Power of an appropriate multi-national event."  This boost may occur in other events, but this is the only event in the WAGR history with a nice round number for its Power two years in a row, meaning that a minimum threshold was obviously applied. Our WAGR Power Estimator shows that the 2025 should've received a 348 Power rating.

Instead of receiving 13.59 points for winning the event, Newman received 16.25 points. Every other ranked player in the field received the same 20% bump in his points assignment. Where this is particularly meaningful is two participants, 9th place Dominic Musonda and 11th place Adrian Andrade, were unranked coming into the event, yet received the 6.5 points needed to become a ranked player.  Without the 20% boost, both players would've been below 6.5 and still unranked.

Conceptually, we've got no problem with the R&A providing a boost to developing countries.  It does need to be done so very carefully, because they are knowingly and intentionally trading the first part of their stated mission ("Accurately rank players as they compete in competitions") for their third one ("to stimulate ambition in players and federations to succeed in development of their game and golfing ability").  It seems like the third objective was already achieved through staging the event and providing the incredible exemptions without having to disrupt the accuracy of this and every subsequent event around the world. Essentially, they allowed the Africa Am to leapfrog 80 events with stronger fields.

A Power adjustment might be warranted if golfers in these under-developed areas were somehow not getting fully and accurately recognized for their performances.  But if there's anything that WAGR Files readers have recognized, it's that top golfers in relatively shallow-field countries receive outsized points in WAGR, mopping up wins and top finishes against weaker fields.  This eventually leads to the player seemingly single-handedly elevating the strength of field of events in that country to the point that it leads to the 2nd- and 3rd-best golfers also climbing.

We've seen this time and time again in junior golf.  It looks like this is occurring with amateur golf in Kenya.  There were nine Kenyan golfers in the African Amateur field, including the top two ranked Am's in the field.  The nine Kenyan's combined to contribute nearly 35% of the 'true' Power event of the tournament.

Kenyan golf has been dominated by Michael Warigia, who has more wins than anybody in amateur golf over the last two years.  23 wins in 45 counting events is an incredible feat, comparable to Tiger Woods circa 2000.  Warigia is the highest-ranked golfer in the Africa Am field at 52 and he finished 8th.  It wasn't long ago when Michael was playing in 30-40 Power events in his home country.  Now the 2024 and 2025 editions of those same events are receiving 180-190 Points.  Check out the 2021 vs. 2025 Sigona Bowl [note: the 2025 event was played at 6300 yards, par 72]

So clearly WAGR has a system that has allowed these Kenyan golfers to flourish and this has opened up opportunities to compete on grander stages. Warigia, for example, has played in the last two British Amateurs and will be exempt into the 2025 U.S. Amateur at Olympic Club.  And this growth in WAGR has led to Kenya having the second-most WAGR-ranked players in the African Am field.  So how have these golfers performed?  Let's do a quick head-to-head comparison of the nine ranked Kenyan players in the field to a corresponding player in the field from South Africa (note: they aren't officially "Teams" but let's call it that for the sake of this exercise).

What we hope you'll notice is that at nearly every 'position' 1-9, Team Kenya has a WAGR advantage relative to their Team South Africa counterpart. So if the rankings are an accurate reflection of relative skill and performance (i.e. meeting the primary objective of WAGR), then you'd expect Team Kenya to be above .500 in head-to-head matches when they collectively play against members of Team South Africa.

What we see, however, in the complete opposite. Team South Africa hold a dominant 120-23-8 (83.1%) record against Team Kenya members when playing head-to-head in the same event.  Sure, some of this may be home course advantage playing at Leopard Creek. But it certainly looks like, at least relatively speaking, South African golfers are being undervalued in WAGR.  If you look at individual head-to-head tournament rounds, South African golfers hold a 346-64-16 (82.1%) record, beating their Kenyan counterparts by an average of five strokes per round (72.6 vs. 77.7).

For some context, an event anchored by the 9 Kenyan's above would have a minimum Power of 148, while an event anchored by the 9 South African's above would have a minimum Power of 103.

And for what it's worth, South African's are well-represented on Data Golf's Top 500 Amateur rankings. There were no Kenyan golfers in the top 500.  Hypothetically, let's assume that given Warigia isn't a top 500 ranked player, all of the Kenya's are overrated by 450 spots. If we were to re-calculate the Power Rating based on Data Golf rather than WAGR Rank, the 9-player Kenyan event drops from 148 to 52 while the South African event increases from 103 to 110.

This is not to say that Data Golf is right or wrong (though we believe it's more directionally correct than WAGR), but rather to point out that WAGR Power is highly sensitive to the ranking of players.  An accurate strength of field metric is highly dependent on having a precise ranking, and an accurate ranking (reminder: the stated mission of WAGR) is highly dependent on having precise measures of the strength of each tournament field.  This is the exact reason why inaccuracies and overstatements tend to spiral into a vicious cycle over time.

In any case, It will be interesting to see how these players continue to grow and develop, especially as WAGR ranking and performances in top amateur events open up opportunities around the world.  And for Bryan Newman, he capped off his big week with a commitment to play at Arizona State starting in spring 2026!

Speaking of WAGR, check out the latest Driven Golf Podcast episode, where Ryan Frazer from Agora Golf and Jim have a fantasy draft of junior golf tournaments. We get into some of the WAGR nuances that can influence tournament-entry decisions for junior golfers.

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