BATON ROUGE — The LSU men’s golf team is ready to tee it up for the first time in three months when it kicks off its spring season Saturday at the 31st SunTrust Gator Invitational at the Mark Bostick Golf Course in Gainesville, Fla.
Members of the 14-team field will get their first look at the course during Friday’s practice round as it will play to a par 70 and 6,701 yards for the championship.
The first and second rounds of the tournament will be played Saturday with a shotgun start scheduled for 7 a.m. CT, while the final round is set for Sunday with tee times beginning at 7 a.m.
The Tigers will compete against arguably the strongest field they have faced to this point in the season as six teams enter the weekend ranked in the latest Golfweek/Sagarin Performance Index Top 30, including No. 9 Duke, No. 12 Florida, No. 13 Florida State, No. 18 Wake Forest, No. 25 Mississippi State and No. 30 Ole Miss.
Also making the trip to Gainesville this weekend are teams from Coastal Carolina, Georgia Southern, Georgia State, North Florida, South Alabama, South Florida and UAB.
“We’re excited to open the spring season at an event like the Gator Invitational. It’s always a great tournament with typically good weather for early February,” said LSU head coach Chuck Winstead. “This will be a great opportunity for our guys to shake off some rust and get back into competition after a long layoff.”
Winstead has elected to play with a lineup that features three players making their return to the Gator Invitational for the second straight season, including senior Brian Noonan, junior Jarrod Barsamian and sophomore Bryant Lach. Freshmen Andrew Loupe and John Peterson will also be in action this weekend.
Loupe, Noonan and Peterson will each be making their sixth tournament appearance of the season after cracking the starting lineup in all five events in the fall, while Barsamian is making his fourth appearance and Lach is in the lineup for the second time in 2007-08.
The Tigers are without the services of their top performer from the fall as freshman Clayton Rotz will be sidelined with an illness for an indefinite period of time.
Rotz cracked the starting lineup in all five tournaments during the fall season and finished as the team’s top scorer with a 73.6 stroke average in 15 competitive rounds. He also earned a team-high two top-10 and four top-20 finishes in five events.
“We’ll miss Clayton this week. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that,” Winstead said. “When you lose the guy who played No. 1 for you in the fall, you’re obviously not going to be the same team. With that said, I look for our guys to play well this weekend. They’re excited to get back into tournament play after the break.”
LSU has seen its share of success in one of the premier tournaments of the spring season as it has captured a total of three team titles at the Gator Invitational with its last coming in 2002. The Florida Gators are the four-time defending champions of their home tournament.
The Tigers are paired with Georgia State and South Florida in the tournament’s opening rounds and will tee off from holes 12-15 beginning at 8 a.m. Live scoring of the event will be provided by Golfstat and can be found online at the organization’s official website, www.golfstat.com.