With a list of past champions that reads more like a who’s who of competitive golf at the highest level, the Winn Grips Heather Farr Classic Hosted by Longbow celebrates 15 years of elite junior golf competition in the Valley of the Sun.

Ever heard of Hunter Mahan? He won it in ’99. Chandler’s own Richard Lee took top honors in 2007. This year he finished T63 in the Waste Management Phoenix Open, sandwiched between PGA Tour veterans Boo Weekley and Aaron Baddeley. How about last year’s champion, Beau Hossler? He’s already qualified for two U.S. Opens, finishing tied for 29th in 2012, where he even held the outright lead midway through the second round.

On the girl’s side, Paula Creamer is the only player in tournament history to win twice, besting the field with back-to-back victories in ’03 and ’04. However, 2010 champion Alison Lee will have an opportunity to match that record this year with her fifth-consecutive tournament appearance. The highest-ranked girl in the field, Lee’s 2012 successes include wins at the ANNIKA Invitational and The PING Invitational, as well as a runner-up finish at the U.S. Girls Junior Championship. She also recently earned an invitation to compete in the LPGA’s Kraft Nabisco Championship in April. But, even her fine-tuned game wasn’t enough to hold off the home-grown talent of last year’s champion—Lindsey Weaver.

Shortly after her victory at Longbow, the Scottsdale native moved on to anchor the Notre Dame Women’s Golf Team. As a freshman, she currently ranks 3rd (as of 2-28) in the individual Golfweek/Sagarin Rankings. Along the way to victory in 2012, Weaver broke the women’s course record at Longbow with a 7-under-par 64. And, two months before that she went snake-belly low, firing an amazing 59 during a PING Junior Interclub match at Desert Mountain.

Players on the boy’s side to keep an eye on include Arizona State-commit, Nicolo Galletti, who is a two-time Rolex Junior All-American with six top-20 finishes in national competition. He finished runner-up at the 2011 Winn Grips Heather Farr Classic hosted by Longbow, T7 at the 2012 HP Boys Championship at Carlton Woods and T5 at the 2012 U.S. Junior Amateur Championship.

Scottsdale native, Christopher Petefish, enters the field after collecting seven top-10 finishes in national competition. He opened the 2012 season with a T5 performance at the Puerto Rico Junior Open and went on to finish T6 at the Scott Robertson Memorial. A junior at Scottsdale Christian Academy, Petefish has verbally committed to compete at Georgia Tech.

Although it’s hard to say who will come out on top in this year’s Winn Grips Heather Farr Classic Hosted by Longbow, one thing is for sure:  they will make the long and prestigious list of success stories written by American Junior Golf Association (AJGA) Alumni. More than 200 AJGA alumni currently play on the PGA and LPGA Tours with roughly 350 Tour victories under their white belts. For those golf fans who would like to see the next Hunter Mahan before he becomes the Hunter Mahan, the AJGA is the place to look, and there’s a good chance he’ll be playing in this year’s tournament at Longbow.