Rachel Heck closed out Anna Davis on the 18th green Thursday, winning 1-up in the round of 64 at the 2026 U.S. Women’s Amateur at The Honors Course in OLTEWAH, Tenn. It was the kind of finish Heck had been waiting for: tight, tense and decided only at the end.
For Heck, the result was more than a line on the bracket. It was her first match-play victory at the U.S. Women’s Amateur since her quarterfinal run in 2023, and it came during what she described as only her third competitive event of the year. That makes the win a marker of return as much as advancement. Anna Davis, the 2022 Augusta National Women’s Amateur champion, was the opponent on the other side of a match that stayed close to the final hole.
Heck said the pressure she had been looking for did not show up in the abstract. It arrived only once the match was on the line. “So much excitement,” she said, adding that it was “so fun to feel those emotions again, the adrenaline and the nerves. I haven't felt that in a long time.” She also said, “This is the feeling I really wanted when I decided to get back into amateur golf and play some more,” and that she “wanted the opportunity to come down the stretch in a match and have my heart racing.”
That is what made Thursday matter. Heck, a former NCAA individual champion and two-time Curtis Cup competitor, was not just surviving a test against a decorated opponent; she was proving she could still find the edge that match play demands after a limited schedule this year. The experience she talked about was not clean or comfortable. She wanted the pressure, and only in the heat of battle did it arrive the way she hoped.
The win moves Heck on, with live scoring pointing to her next match even though the opponent was not named. The larger story is already clear: after a long stretch without this sort of finish, Heck got exactly the kind of match she said she came back for, and she won it on the final green.
