BATON ROUGE — The LSU Tigers women’s golf team will be joined by some of the nation’s best collegiate teams for the NCAA East Regional Golf Championships, May 9-11, at the school’s University Club.
A total of 21 teams and three individuals were announced by the NCAA selection committee on Monday for the 54-hole event in which eight teams and two individuals not on those eight teams will advance to the NCAA Division I Women’s Golf Championships at the Washington National Golf Club in Auburn, Wash., at the end of the month.
Similar fields were selected for the Central (Michigan State) and West (Stanford) regionals which will be held at the same time advancing the same numbers to the national championship event.
The East may be the strongest of the three with nine SEC schools in the field and 19 of the 21 teams are ranked in the top 47 in the Sagarin performance index.. The field for the East in tournament seed order with Sagarin rankings in parenthesis:
1. Auburn (1); 2. Duke (2), 3. Georgia (9); 4. Tennessee (7); 5. Vanderbilt (11); 6. Florida (12); 7. South Carolina (21); 8. Wake Forest (20); 9. Furman (27); 10. North Carolina (31); 11. LSU (28); 12. Tulane (32): 13. Mississippi State (36); 14. Memphis (37); 15. Texas A&M (47); 16. Central Florida (40); 17. Alabama (43); 18. South Florida (42); 19. North Carolina State (45); 20. Yale (102); 21. Jackson State (184).
Duke, South Carolina, Furman, Yale and Jackson State all advanced with automatic bids from their conferences while the other East teams were selected at-large.
The three individual qualifiers are Katie Futcher of Penn State, Camilla Hilland of Miami (Florida) and Jessica Lewis, James Madison.
With so many top ranked teams in the field, it is obvious that the individual talent will be stacked in the Baton Rouge event with 15 of the top 30 players on the Sagarin chart coming to Baton Rouge, including six of the top 10: No. 4. Angela Jerman of Georgia, No. 5 Virada Pirapathpongporn, No. 6 two-time SEC champion Kristy McPherson of South Carolina; No. 7 Candy Hannemann of Duke; No. 9 Celeste Troche of Auburn and No. 10 Shreveport senior Meredith Duncan of LSU. Louisiana is also represented in the national rankings and the East Regional by Benton senior Sarah Johnston of Alabama, ranked 20th in the country.
“It’s very obvious that this is the toughest regional,” said LSU coach Karen Bahnsen, “which was to be expected with the strength of play here this year.
It will be a treat for college golf fans to see this caliber of play over three days at the University Club and we are looking forward to hosting the event. We will work hard and we are confident that we can make the top eight and advance to another NCAA Championship.”
For LSU, this is the eighth consecutive year the Lady Tigers have invited to NCAA Regional play and will be trying to advance to a fifth straight Division I women’s championship round.