BATON ROUGE — The LSU women’s golf team concludes its fall season of play this weekend in “The Derby” Invitational, hosted by Auburn University beginning Friday at the Auburn University Club.
The Derby, is named in honor of Curtis Cup Champion and former Auburn player and coach, Virginia Derby-Grimes. Grimes played at Auburn in the mid-1980s and coached the team from 1991-94.
LSU has twice won the event, in 1995 and 1996, both times at 36 holes when the middle round was washed out. Joining LSU and Auburn in the 2005 event are Alabama, Ole Miss, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, Kansas, South Carolina, UNC Wilmington, West Florida, Duke, Florida State, Florida, N.C. State, Texas and Oklahoma State.
The Auburn University Club course will play at par 72 and 6,270 yards for the championship.
Coach Karen Bahnsen is hoping for another strong performance from her two top players, Kim Meck and Alexis Rather. The two sophomores both had top-10 finishes in the Chrysler Challenge last week at Sandestin. Meck finished in second place with a score of eight over 221 (74-74-73) and Rather finished in a tie for 10th place with a 227 on rounds of 77-73-77.
Meck comes in after three tournaments averaging a team best 75.3 strokes per round, while Rather in two events is averaging 75.8.
The rest of the LSU lineup will include junior Melissa Eaton (76.0), Rebecca Kuhn (76.6) and Vicky Meyer (77.8).
The Lady Tiger team has been notoriously slow starters this season and Coach Karen Bahnsen is hopeful the team can get off to a better start and have some consistency throughout the lineup.
“It’s been our problem in every event,” said Bahnsen. “We have worked hard this week and in the practice to be ready for any situation and not compound bogeys into triple bogeys and quads. We need to have every player grinding hard to get the best possible score in to give us a chance against another quality field.”
The tournament runs through Sunday with 18 holes each day. Live scoring for the tournament can be found at www.golfstat.com.