In 1964, Wisconsin native Carol Sorenson Flenniken became the youngest woman ever to win the British Ladies Amateur Championship. Carol grew up playing golf on the Janesville Country Club in Janesville, Wisconsin. She won two Wisconsin state junior titles, the Women’s Western Junior Girls’ Championship in 1959 and the USGA Girls’ Junior title in 1960.
In 1962, Carol won the Women’s Collegiate Championship while attending Arizona State University, and she also won the Women’s Western Amateur title. In addition to her British Amateur crown in 1964, she recorded a semifinal finish in the U.S. Women’s amateur and won the Women’s Trans-Mississippi title. She was selected to the 1964 Curtis Cup Team and the World Cup Team, where she tied for the low individual honor.
Here in Colorado, Flenniken has won the CWGA Match Play Championship four times and the CWGA Stroke Play Championship a record eight times. And by the time she retired from active competition in the early 2000s, her 25 victories in CWGA/CGA events stood as a record. In 2016, on the occasion of the Colorado Women’s Golf Association’s 100th anniversary, the organization named her its Player of the Century.
