The defending champion has been eliminated from this US Women’s Amateur.

Auburn graduate Megan Schofill, last year’s champion at Bel-Air Country Club, led by 2 strokes with six holes to play on Wednesday at Southern Hills in Tulsa, Oklahoma. But Princeton’s Catherine Rao won each of the next four holes and turned the match around with an eagle-birdie-birdie-birdie against Schofill to advance to Thursday’s round of 32 with a 2-and-1 victory.

“It makes it a little nicer,” Rao said of the win against the defending champion, “but at the end of the day, I’m out here and I think the most important thing I learned from the US Amateurs is that I’m out here to play golf and I’m competing against myself more than anyone else. I just do my thing, stay calm and try to take the pressure off. It doesn’t really matter to me if I’m playing against the former champion or someone I don’t even know.”

In the second round, she will face another college graduate, former LSU player Latanna Stone.

Rao was the Ivy League’s top freshman as a freshman, reaching the quarterfinals of the Women’s British Amateur and the U.S. Women’s Amateur last summer, but missed her entire sophomore season due to injury. She again competed in the Women’s British Amateur match play tournaments earlier this summer, but lost in the round of 16.

Fourteen of the top 20 in the Women’s World Amateur Golf Rankings updated Wednesday morning teed off this week, and all 14 made match play. Those same players finished 8-6 on Wednesday despite three of the top seven — UCLA’s Zoe Campos, USC’s Catherine Park and Stanford freshman-to-be Andrea Revuelta — being eliminated. Campos led USC’s Bailey Shoemaker, the most recent runner-up in the Augusta National Women’s Amateur, 2-0 after 11 holes before losing 1-0 when Shoemaker won the final hole with a bogey.

Shoemaker was the only player to survive both a 20-of-10 playoff that went only two holes on Wednesday morning and her opening match.

“It doesn’t feel like it today,” Shoemaker said of the playoff. “It was crazy. It’s my first USGA playoff ever. Of course I was disappointed to even be in it, but it was a tough battle. I knew if I just made the par game like we do in school, whoever made the most pars would win.”

Stanford, the defending NCAA team champion and the undisputed No. 1 seed this fall, has just one player left in the championship (Kelly Xu) after sophomore Paula Martin Sampedro also dropped out on Wednesday. Texas has the most players remaining with four — Farah O’Keefe, Lauren Kim, Angelo Heo and Cindy Hsu.

World number five Jasmine Koo, an incoming freshman at USC, is the top-ranked player remaining after topping Selena Liao of Texas by 2 points. Wake Forest graduate Rachel Kuehn (8), Texas A&M’s reigning NCAA singles champion Adela Cernousek (9), and recent U.S. Girls’ Junior winner Rianne Malixi (10) were the other top-10 players who advanced to the round of 32. Kuehn, who turns professional later this year, scored the most convincing win, a 7-and-5 victory over Palmer Cup’s Mary Kelly Mulcahy, who remained unbeaten in international competition for the past month. Kuehn’s next opponent: top-seeded stroke play medalist Maria Jose Marin of Arkansas, beat Leigha Devine 6-and-5.