BATON ROUGE — The LSU men’s golf team will put the finishing touches on its preparation for next month’s SEC Championships as it heads to the state of South Carolina to compete in the third-annual Hootie at Bulls Bay Intercollegiate at Bulls Bay Golf Club in Awendaw.
The course will play to a par 72 and 7,014 yards for the championship with the field teeing off in the first round Sunday beginning at 9 a.m. CDT. A second round will be played Monday followed by a final round Tuesday to decide the championship.
”This is a great college golf tournament and a fun course for the guys to play,” said LSU head coach Chuck Winstead. “The par threes are definitely the most challenging holes and define this golf course. The greens are also very undulating and very fast. If we can putt the ball well over the course of three rounds then we can have a good week.”
This year’s event features a Southern flavor with five teams of the 15 teams entering the weekend ranked in the latest Golfweek/Sagarin Top 25 power rankings.
The Tigers, who finished in sixth place out of 15 teams at this event last season, will battle the likes of tournament host College of Charleston, No. 11 Coastal Carolina, No. 17 North Carolina, No. 22 Duke, No. 24 Wake Forest, No. 25 Florida State, Arkansas, Augusta State, Baylor, Central Florida, Kentucky, NC State, South Carolina and Vanderbilt.
Winstead has elected to compete with a familiar lineup as senior Chris Wells, juniors Brian Noonan and Beck Troutman, and freshmen Brent Blaum and Bryant Lach have cracked the starting lineup in the team’s final tournament appearance before the conference championships.
Wells is coming off of back-to-back solid performances in his last two outings, which includes his best finish of the season at the Seminole Intercollegiate earlier this month where he tied for third place in the individual standings with a three-round total of 3-under par 213. The Mobile, Ala., native is also tied for the team lead with a 73.3 stroke average.
Noonan and Troutman will join Wells in making their eighth tournament appearance of the 2006-07 season as the trio has seen action in each of LSU’s events thus far. Blaum will be making his seventh tournament appearance while competing as a true freshman, while Lach has cracked the lineup for the fourth time in his true freshman season.
This marks the third year that Bulls Bay Golf Club has hosted one of the premier young tournaments of the college season. Wake Forest is the defending champion after capturing the team title last season by an incredible 16 strokes over runner-up Central Florida, while Jamie Miller of Augusta State won medalist honors with a 54-hole record score of 9-under 204.
The Tigers are paired with Central Florida and Coastal Carolina in the opening round and will tee off from the back nine beginning at 9 a.m. Live scoring of this week’s event will be provided by Golfstat and can be found online at www.golfstat.com.
After returning to Baton Rouge, the Tigers will break for one month before making their annual trip to St. Simons Island, Ga., to compete in the 2007 SEC Men’s Golf Championships at Sea Island Golf Club from April 20-22. The most competitive conference tournament in the country will by played on the Seaside Course.