LOOKING IN ON: GOLF

Saturday, July 14, 2007 | 7:06 a.m.

Rounds in which Brett Kanda shot below par during his redshirt freshman season at UNLV

Kanda's scoring average this season in 20 competitive rounds for UNLV

All season long, UNLV head golf coach Dwaine Knight talked to his players about the importance of not panicking when things started to go wrong on the golf course.

The Rebels' tendency for much of the past season was to start pressing and, as a result, bogeys often turned into double bogeys and worse.

So it came as a pleasant surprise to Knight when Brett Kanda, who just completed his redshirt freshman season at UNLV, overcame a potential back-nine collapse this month and won the prestigious 108th Southern California Golf Association Amateur Championship at Victoria Club in Riverside.

Kanda, 20, began the final round with a five-stroke lead and improved that to seven shots after nine holes. Kanda played the first four holes on the back side in four over par, however, and saw his lead dwindle to two shots.

"I was never worried because I knew I had two par-five holes coming up," Kanda, a Southern California native, said.

He birdied both par-5 holes and held on for a three-shot win in one of the top amateur tournaments in California.

"That's quite a step for him," Knight said of Kanda's victory. "He felt comfortable, even though he was struggling, that he could handle those par fives and, sure enough, he birdied both of them.

"That's the kind of material you're looking for in these young guys and that's really a good sign of maturity right there."

Kanda said he has been making a conscious effort to bring a little more stability to his game.

"I, personally, was really inconsistent this season," he said. "I've been working on that this summer and trying to be more consistent and I kind of did it at the SCGA." Though Knight was pleased with Kanda's performance, he certainly wasn't surprised that Kanda opened the tournament with rounds of 68 and 66 on the par-71 Victoria Club course.

"He's very capable of really putting up some low numbers and that's hard to teach," Knight said. "You've got to have that little bit of mentality to be able to shoot those kinds of numbers and he has that."

Kanda played in seven tournaments for the Rebels this season with varying degrees of success. He showed the ability to post low scores, including a 65 in the final round of the Rebels' victory at the Morris Williams Intercollegiate in Austin, Texas, and a 67 in the closing round of the Mountain West Conference Championship, where he tied for ninth.

Good company

Kanda's score of 9-under-par 275 was the third-best winning score in the SCGA Amateur Championship since the tournament switched from match play to stroke play in 1957.

Tiger Woods shot 270 when he won the tournament in 1994 and Brad Greer carded a 274 in winning the 1985 tournament.

"It's quite a feather in his cap," Knight said, "and I'm very proud of him."

Bigger stage

It went unnoticed by most of the local news media, but UNLV's Natasha Krishna played in her first professional golf tournament last month.

Krishna, who recently completed her freshman season with the Rebels' women's golf team, was granted an exemption to play in the Japan LPGA Tour event in Hyogo, Japan. She shot rounds of 75 and 80 at the Rokko Kokusai Golf Club and missed the cut by five shots.

A native of Auckland, New Zealand, Krishna carried a 74.6 scoring average this season for UNLV.