BATON ROUGE — The LSU Lady Tigers made a big move in the Golfstat performance poll after its successful runner-up finish in last week’s LSU/Cleveland Golf Classic, moving from 23 to 19 in the poll.
Now the Lady Tigers try to see if they can continue to improve on that with their performance beginning Friday in the 36th annual Liz Murphey Collegiate Classic at the University of Georgia golf course in Athens, Ga.
LSU, Arkansas and Florida State will lead the field off the first team at 8 a.m. CDT in a strong field that also includes Alabama, Auburn, Duke, Furman, Georgia, Kent State, Kentucky, Purdue, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas A&M, Central Florida, Vanderbilt, Virginia and Wake Forest.
Duke is ranked No. 1 in the present Golfstat poll with Purdue seventh, Auburn eighth, Wake Forest ninth and Arkansas 10. Alabama is ranked 11th with Kent State (13), Georgia (14) and Tennessee 18th. Auburn is the defending champion with scores of 881 with Leah Wigger of Virginia the winner a year ago at one-under 215.
“We are very pleased with what happened for us last weekend at the University Club,” said LSU Coach Karen Bahnsen. “We really stood up to the challenge and we feel like we are playing some good golf here in the spring. Hopefully we can continue to make the shots we need to this week. This is a very good test against a challenging field and a challenging golf course.”
Senior Rebecca Kuhn is coming into the event off a third-place finish in the LSU/Cleveland with a one-under 215. Freshman Megan McChrystal finished seventh at five-over 221 as she continues to lead the team in stroke average at 73.7. The rest of the lineup will include senior Alexis Rather, junior Caroline Martens and freshman Lindy LaBauve, who will return to the lineup for the first time this spring.
Live scoring on the event can be found at www.golfstat.com.