Annie Park will receive Honda Sports Award for golf

While the world's elite women golfers all are headed toward Long Island to practice for the U.S. Women's Open, Long Island's top representative will be headed far away. Annie Park of Levittown, who will play in the national championship starting Thursday in Southampton, will begin the week in Los Angeles, receiving a national award.

Park will be presented the Honda Sports Award for golf in a ceremony to be shown at 8 p.m. Monday on ESPNU. It was a hard choice between preparing for the major championship at Sebonack Golf Club and flying across the country for the Honda event, but Andrea Gaston, her coach at Southern Cal, said Park believed it was important to her school and her team that she appear at the ceremony. It is being held on the USC campus.

"It's not like she doesn't know Sebonack," Gaston said, adding that Park, her mother and sister will take a red-eye flight back to New York on Monday night.

The golfer, 18, is a finalist for the 2013 Honda Cup, which goes to the top athlete of the year in all of women's college sports. That will be announced at the ceremony.

In an email, Park said she already has played a few practice rounds at Sebonack and has been working lightly on her short game since coming home from the U.S. Women's Amateur Public Links in Norman, Okla. Park tied for the best score in the stroke-play qualifying part of the competition, but in the first round of match play, she was upset by 2,883rd-ranked Ciera Min, 6 and 4.

Park, eighth in the women's world amateur rankings, told Gaston she regretted having shot so well in the qualifier, seeing it as a jinx.

"But I told her, 'You have to play your game,' " the coach said.