BATON ROUGE — The 25th season of LSU women’s golf begins in a new location Sunday as the Lady Tiger golf team teams off in the University of Alabama-Ann Rhoads Intercollegiate at the Capstone Club of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
The new season marks the 20th for Coach Karen Bahnsen as the head coach of the Tigers as she looks forward to a season in which LSU will not only host its annual LSU/Cleveland Golf Classic in early March, but also the annual Southeastern Conference Women’s Championship in April, 2004. The last time the Tigers hosted the tournament in 1992, LSU won its only women’s conference title.
This year’s team has a blend of the old and the new as the opening tournament lineup will feature one new player, but four players who have worked hard to prepare for this year and to gain the consistency that often was missing from last year’s lineups which struggled at times to stay in the hunt.
“The girls have been working very hard and it has certainly shown in their qualifying rounds for this event,” said Bahnsen, the dean of SEC women’s golf coaches. “We are not really going into this tournament looking as much to beat a particular team or finish in a certain position, but we are concentrating on a particular score that we would like to aim for over the next three days.”
In the field along with LSU and host Alabama will be Alabama Birmingham, Augusta State, Birmingham Southern, Florida State, Jacksonville State, Memphis, Middle Tennessee, Mississippi State, Samford and Troy State. The 54-hole tournament runs through Tuesday on the par-72, 6,128-yard layout.
LSU will go with sophomore Vicky Meyer, junior Brooke Shelton, seniors Isabel Dornellas and Devon Day and freshman Alexis Rather.
Meyer joined the team in the spring from Brazil and led the team in stroke average last year, including a top-ten performance in Puerto Rico, while Dornellas won the Collegiate Players Series event at Pelican Point earlier in the summer. Rather makes her debut after coming to LSU from Tupelo, Miss., where her prep career was highlighted by qualifying for the 2003 U. S. Team in the Aaron Baddeley Junior World Championships in Fiji.
This is the first of four fall tournaments for the Lady Tigers over the next six weeks.