BATON ROUGE — The LSU women’s golf team, ranked 11th in the nation in the GolfWorld coaches poll, received its seventh-consecutive bid to the NCAA Regional Women’s Golf Tournament on Monday.
For the first time, there are three regional tournament teams advance to, with LSU assigned to the Central Regional at the Birck Boilermaker Golf Complex-Kampen Course, May 10-12, in West Lafayette, Ind. This will be the first Central Regional event. The East Regional will take place at the same time in Chapel Hill, N.C., and the West Regional will be held in Corvallis, Ore.
In all, 63 teams advanced based on either automatic qualification from certain conference tournaments or from season results and head-to-head encounters. Eight teams from each region will advance to the NCAA Division I National Championships at the Howie-in-the-Hills Resort in south Florida, May 22-25. The Lady Tigers will be trying to advance to the championship round for the fourth-consecutive year.
“We knew the bid was coming,” said LSU coach Karen Bahnsen, “But it is always great to see it finally in print in front of you. I think things have really gone our way in the way the fields were placed in each region. We’re practicing hard and we’ve just got to out there like we did the last two tournaments and put things together to advance on and take our season as far as it can go.”
In its past two tournaments, the Tigers set school records with an even-par 54-hole total of 864 to win the LSU/Cleveland Golf Classic over Auburn by eight shots and then finished second in the SEC Championships at the University of Florida golf course.
Top-ranked Duke is in the East regional and No. 2 Arizona is in the West, with the top-ranked teams in LSU’s region being No. 8 New Mexico State and No. 9 Texas. In all there are eight teams ranked in the top 25, including LSU. Rounding out the other five in the field are 13th ranked Tulsa, 14th-ranked Oklahoma State, host Purdue (17th), 24th-ranked New Mexico and 25th-ranked Kent State.
Also in the Central field are Alabama and Florida from the SEC, California, Central Florida, Baylor, San Francisco, Nebraska, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Minnesota, Idaho, Oral Roberts and Princeton.
In all, seven SEC teams made the field with Auburn, Georgia and Vanderbilt advancing to the East regional and Tennessee in the West to go with the three in the Central Region.