Barden Ridge young gun Kayun Mudadana has been selected as one of two athletes for the Cam Smith Scholarship for 2024, giving him priceless time with the 2022 Open Champion at his home in the United States.
Mududana, a member of the New South Wales Golf Club, was runner-up in the Australian Boys Amateur this year and was a pivotal member of the NSW Junior Interstate Team who took the Australian Junior Teams crown in Perth this past April.
The 18-year-old, who began his golf as a nine-year-old at Kareela Golf Club before moving on to Cronulla Golf Club, recently represented Australia in a two-day competition against the U.S. National Junior Team at SentryWorld in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. He also represented Australia at the Toyota World Juniors in Japan in late May.
“I was just practising one afternoon and I got a missed call, so I called it back and it was Tony Meyer from Golf Australia and he gave me some good news,” Mudadana said.
“I was pretty shocked; I was really excited. I called my parents straight away and they were really happy for me as well.”
Queensland’s Wes Hinton, also 18, was selected alongside Mudadana. Hinton was sixth at the Australian Boys Amateur in 2024 and won the 2023 club championship at his home course of Keperra Country Golf Club.
In addition to time with Smith at home in Jacksonville, Florida, the pair will travel with him and attend the LIV Golf individual championship in Chicago this September, where Smith will be competing with his Ripper GC teammates Marc Leishman, Matt Jones (another Kareela GC alumni) and Lucas Herbert.
“It’ll be really good to see how he prepares for a good tournament and how he practises through the week and how he goes through every day,” Mudadana added.
The Cameron Smith Scholarship began in 2016 as a collaboration between major-championship winner Smith and Golf Australia as part of the Give Back program, where elite-level professional players repay some of their funding by helping out with the High-Performance program.
The Cameron Smith Scholarship was restricted to elite Queensland amateurs until last year when it was extended to include athletes from all states and territories. As a result, Bexley’s Jeff Guan became the first non-Queensland recipient of the award in 2023
Like Guan, several of the sports rising stars including Jed Morgan, Elvis Smylie and Louis Dobbelaar have all benefited from time with Smith and mentoring as part of the scholarship.
“The Cameron Smith Scholarship is an extremely valuable tool for our High-Performance program,” said Golf Australia’s High-Performance Director Tony Meyer.
“We’re eternally grateful to Cam that he has taken this project on and that he is so genuinely invested in it. Cam loves the notion of bringing players through and imparting his knowledge as well as showing the players a good time.
“All the players who’ve been to stay and practice with Cam in the US have let us know that they gleaned a hell of a lot from it. I have no doubt that Wes and Kayun are going to have a great time and pick up some really important learnings.”
Cameron Smith has won 12 professional tournaments around the world and in 2022 became the fifth Australian winner of the Open Championship behind Greg Norman, Kel Nagle, Peter Thomson and Ian Baker-Finch.
