BATON ROUGE — The LSU women’s golf team finished the final 1999 national rankings as the ninth best team in the country after the fall season of play.
The Lady Tigers are ranked ninth in both the MasterCard college rankings of the College Golf Foundation and the GolfWeek/Sagarin rankings. The Lady Tigers will begin their spring season of play in late February and will host the LSU Invitational at the school’s University Club April 7-9, 2000.
The polls are split on the number one team with Duke topping the GolfWeek/Sagarin computer rankings and Arizona on top in the MasterCard rankings, voted on by a panel of college coaches.
Individually, Lisette Lee, the LSU senior from Kenner, who finished the fall with the team’s top stroke average of 75.08 is ranked 19th in the list of 25 players in the MasterCard rankings.
In the Sagarin ratings, LSU has three players in the top 100 with Lee ranked 16th in the nation and Shreveport sophomore Meredith Duncan (75.25 average) just three spots back at 19th. LSU junior Katy Wilkinson of South Bend, Ind., is 55th in the Sagarin ratings (76.92 average).
LSU is expected to get New Zealand sophomore Tina Howard back in the spring after missing the entire fall schedule because of surgery to repair an injured tendon in her hand.
“I’m very pleased with what this team accomplished this fall against a very difficult schedule,” said LSU Coach Karen Bahnsen. “We finished 10th in the NCAAs last year with basically the same team and now we want to work hard this spring to get back to the championships for a third straight year.”
LSU, according to the Sagarin ratings, played the seventh toughest schedule in women’s college golf this fall. After Duke in the Sagarin ratings comes Southern California, Arizona, Arizona State with Georgia in fifth. New Mexico State is sixth, with Stanford and Wake Forest in front of LSU in ninth with Oklahoma State rounding out the top 10.
The MasterCard ratings put Duke behind Arizona with Southern California in third, followed by Arizona State and Georgia again in fifth. The second five are Stanford in sixth, with New Mexico State seventh, Wake Forest eighth and Oklahoma State and LSU tied for ninth.