Just when you thought passionate flag-waving had disappeared from the international golf scene until the next Ryder Cup in 2001, the ninth annual World Junior Golf Team Championship is set to tee off in Kobe, Japan, this Wednesday (June 14).

	Mahan is a top player.

Hosted by the Asahi Kokusai Tojo Country Club, the four-day, 72-hole tournament championship will feature an impressive team assemblage of talented teenage golfers. The four-man U.S. squad will square off against golfers from England (last year's champs), Japan, Canada, Korea, Trinidad and Tobago, Italy, Chile, Sweden, Finland, South Africa, New Zealand, Thailand and Columbia. Each country will play four golfers, with the top three scores from each team counting toward that day's total.

"The experience is a great one,"says James Oh, a senior at Lakewood High (Calif.), who is one of two returning U.S. players and will attend UNLV in the fall on a full golf scholarship. "Every competition like this raises the level of your game. You learn something from it. We're going over there to win. I thought we were going to take it last year, but it didn't work out that way. This year, I'm going to drill that into the guys' heads and it's going to be a little bit bigger deal to us."

This year's U.S. team was chosen by a national selection committee comprised of collegiate golf coaches, who solicited nomination forms from the country's top 25 juniors, according to Golf Week magazine's ratings and picked the 2000 roster from that group.

Oh, who is the No. 2-ranked U.S. junior, will be joined by 1999 team member Ken Lewis of Dennis-Yarmouth High (South Dennis, Mass.), Rusty Kennedy of Brophy College Prep School (Phoenix, Ariz.) and Hunter Mahan of McKinney High (McKinney, Texas).

"By reputation and ranking, these are some of the top junior players in the country, and I'm interested to see how our guys stack up against the rest of the world,"says U.S. coach Tim Baldwin, the head men's golf coach at Southeastern Louisiana University. "The U.S. has the depth, but for sheer quality, there are some fantastic players we'll be facing. This is an outstanding opportunity for these kids to go and play on an international stage and to have that kind of experience is only an asset as they move on."

	Dennis-Yarmouth High's (Mass.) Ken Lewis is one of four junior golfers hoping to take the team title back to the U.S.

One thing is certain: The rest of the world is catching up to the U.S. as far as youth golf talent is concerned. The U.S. captured three of the first four World Junior Golf Team championships, from 1992-95, but has won only once since then, in 1997, finishing fourth ('96), third ('98) and second ('99) in the other years. Last year, England edged the U.S. for the title by six strokes.

The talent gap has narrowed in individual play as well. The U.S. took five of the first six World Junior individual crowns, but the last two have gone to Argentina's Rafael Echenique ('98) and England's Nicholas Dougherty ('99), who is back to defend his title.

But regardless of how this year's championship plays out, America's representatives are thrilled with the opportunity to hone their skills on an international stage.

"It's my first time out of the country,"says Rusty Kennedy, who is ranked No. 25 among U.S. juniors and is headed to the University of Virginia on a full scholarship this fall. "To be able to go and represent the U.S. is pretty special. I got a taste for the international scene at [this year's] Thunderbird (International Junior, in Scottsdale, Ariz.), but this will be a new experience and, hopefully, a fun one. Every player's going to go out and try to play the best they can for their country."