BATON ROUGE — Just three days removed from its appearance in the Gary Koch Invitational, the LSU men’s golf team travels to Jonesborough, Tenn., on Saturday to compete in the eighth-annual Bank of Tennessee Intercollegiate at the Ridges Golf and Country Club.
The course will play to a par 72 and 7,147 yards for the 54-hole championship.
The Tigers join SEC rivals Alabama, Auburn, South Carolina and Tennessee in a strong 15-team field that includes Florida State, North Carolina, Virginia, Virginia Tech and Wake Forest from the ACC. Rounding out the field is tournament host East Tennessee State, Kent State, Northwestern, Oklahoma and TCU.
“It’s a really good field to compete against,” said LSU head coach Chuck Winstead. “There is a good balance of teams from other conferences. We’ll see teams that we haven’t seen so far this year, which is always fun. It should be a really good, competitive tournament.”
LSU followed its win in the inaugural Shoal Creek Intercollegiate by tying for fourth in the Gary Koch Invitational and enters this weekend’s tournament with an overall record of 27-9-2 on the season.
Winstead will play with a lineup of senior Andrew Lanahan, junior Chris Wells and sophomores Brian Noonan, Brent Struthers and Beck Troutman. Wells and Troutman are making their fourth tournament appearance of the season, while Lanahan, Noonan and Struthers are each making their third.
Troutman leads the team with six rounds of par or better and a 71.33 stroke average after posting back-to-back finishes of tied for fourth. Wells follows closely behind with a stroke average of 72 and recorded a season-best finish of tied for eighth in the Shoal Creek Intercollegiate. Lanahan has posted consecutive top-20 finishes and is third on the team with a 72.83 stroke average, while Struthers averages a 73.33 per round and Noonan averages a 73.67.
Winstead said it will be a challenge for his team to regroup after such a short turnaround but that other teams in the field must overcome the same challenge.
“Our players are going to need to get their body right and their mind right to get out there and compete,” Winstead said. “On the other hand, there are a number of teams in this field that had a tournament on Monday and Tuesday, so we’re not the only team that has to play two tournaments in one week. We’re just going to have to get after it.”
The first and second rounds of the tournament will be played Saturday with tee times beginning at 7:45 a.m. The Tigers are paired with Kent State and Virginia Tech and will begin play at 8:30 a.m. Live scoring of the event can be found at www.golfstat.com.