BATON ROUGE — After kicking off its spring season at the Gator Invitational last weekend, the LSU men’s golf team will return to the state of Florida to tee it up in the John Hayt Invitational at Sawgrass Country Club in Ponte Vedra Beach beginning Sunday.
The Tigers are making their return to Sawgrass Country Club for the first time since the spring of 2007 as the course will play to a par 72 and 6,925 yards for the 54-hole championship.
The John Hayt Invitational attracts one of the strongest fields of the spring season as it will feature five teams currently ranked in the latest Golfstat Top 25, including No. 3 Alabama, No. 7 Arizona State, No. 16 Tennessee, No. 20 Tennessee-Chattanooga and No. 25 Duke. Rounding out the 15-team field is Coastal Carolina, Furman, Georgia Southern, Georgia State, North Carolina-Wilmington, North Florida, TCU, Tulsa and UAB.
LSU is set to tee off from the back nine in Sunday’s first-round along with UT-Chattanooga and Furman with tee times beginning at 7:54 a.m. CT. The second round will follow Monday with the final round scheduled to get underway Tuesday with tee times yet to be determined.
The Tigers will play with the same lineup that earned a sixth-place finish in the 14-team field last week at the Gator Invitational as junior Brent Blaum, sophomore Andrew Loupe, sophomore John Peterson, freshman Josh Jones and freshman Sang Yi make their return to action. In addition senior Jarrod Barsamian is set to play as an invitational for the Tigers this week.
Yi earned his team-leading second Top 10 finish of the season by tying for ninth place last week, firing a 1-under 209 in 54 holes that included a pair of rounds at 3-under 67.
Yi also finished on the Top 10 of the leaderboard in his collegiate debut at LSU, leading the team to a share of the team title at the Gopher Invitational on Sept. 14 with a tie for fifth place. With an impressive score of 1-under 209 a week ago, Yi is now tied with Peterson for the team lead with a 73.1 stroke average in five tournament appearances this season.
The Alabama Crimson Tide will tee off as the defending champion of the John Hayt Invitational after taking home the team title a year ago by four shots with a 54-hole score of 9-over 873. Host North Florida took third place in last year’s event with a cumulative score of 22-over 886.
Live scoring of each round of the 2009 John Hayt Invitational will be provided by Golfstat and is available online at the organization’s official website, www.golfstat.com.