BATON ROUGE — The LSU men’s golf team is ready to kick off its spring season this weekend as it makes its annual trip to the Mark Bostick Golf Course in Gainesville, Fla., to compete with many of the nation’s elite teams in the SunTrust Gator Invitational beginning Saturday.
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 54-hole championship.
The first and second rounds of the tournament will be played Saturday with a shotgun start set for 7 a.m. CT, while the final round is scheduled for Sunday with tee times also beginning at 7 a.m.
The Tigers will compete against four teams who enter the spring season ranked in the Golfstat Top 25, including tournament host and 14th-ranked Florida, No. 19 Tennessee-Chattanooga, No. 21 Duke and No. 24 Florida State. Rounding out the 14-team field are Coastal Carolina, Georgia Southern, Georgia State, Mississippi State, North Florida, Ole Miss, Central Florida, Wake Forest and UAB.
LSU will tee off on holes 16-18 in Saturday’s opening round and will play with North Florida and UAB on the opening day of competition. Live scoring of the event will be provided by Golfstat and can be found online by logging on to the organization’s official website at www.golfstat.com.
“The guys are excited about getting the season started,” said LSU head coach Chuck Winstead. “I know it’s been a while, but we’ve been playing and practicing together for about a month and we have had good weather in Baton Rouge to do that. The Gator Invitational is always a great place to start the spring season by playing against a solid field on a great golf course.”
The Tigers have not seen any tournament action since wrapping up the fall season Oct. 28 with an appearance in the Isleworth Collegiate Invitational in Windermere, Fla.
They will open the spring season with a lineup of junior Brent Blaum, sophomore Andrew Loupe, sophomore John Peterson, freshman Josh Jones and freshman Sang Yi.
Loupe and Peterson are each making a return trip to the Gator Invitational for the second year in a row after leading LSU to a sixth-place finish a year ago. Loupe enjoyed his best tournament in the purple and gold as he earned a career-best fourth-place finish with a 54-hole score of 5-under par 205, including a career-low 5-under 65 in the second round.
Peterson was LSU’s top performer in the fall as he posted a team-leading three top 20 finishes, as well as one top 10 finish while posting a team-best 73.3 stroke average in four appearances. Both Loupe and Peterson will be making their fifth tournament appearance of the season along with Yi and Jones, while Blaum has cracked the starting lineup for the first time.
Florida is the defending champion after running away with the team title by 12 strokes a year ago. The Gators posted a 20-under 820 in three rounds to finish 12 shots clear of Florida State.