BATON ROUGE – The LSU men’s golf team will compete in its third tournament in as many weeks this weekend when it makes the trip to Awendaw, S.C., to compete against a strong 15-team field in the sixth-annual Hootie at Bulls Bay Intercollegiate beginning Sunday at Bulls Bay Golf Club.
The three-day, 54-hole championship kicks off Sunday with the first round followed by the second round Monday and the final round Tuesday. The course will play to a par 71 and 7,261 yards for the event.
The sixth edition of the Hootie at Bulls Bay Intercollegiate features an impressive regional field including seven teams ranked among the Top 30 nationally in the Golfweek/Sagarin Performance Index. The Tigers will open play ranked No. 28 in the country and compete alongside No. 3 Augusta State, No. 15 Clemson, No. 17 South Carolina, No. 25 Virginia, No. 29 East Tennessee State and No. 30 Chattanooga.
Rounding out the 15-team field are host College of Charleston, Auburn, Central Florida, Duke, Kentucky, Long Beach State, NC State and Wake Forest.
LSU is paired with Chattanooga and Virginia in Sunday’s opening round and will tee off from the 10th hole beginning at 9 a.m. CT. Pairings for the second and third rounds will be determined after each round of competition. Live scoring of the event can be found online at www.golfstat.com.
LSU head coach Chuck Winstead has elected to play with a five-man starting lineup featuring junior John Peterson and Andrew Loupe and sophomores Austin Gutgsell, Josh Jones and Sang Yi.
Peterson has experienced tremendous success in the Hootie at Bulls Bay Intercollegiate during his college career, which includes an impressive third-place finish on the leaderboard a year ago en route to earning a pair of Second-Team All-America honors in the postseason. Peterson fired an 8-under 205 for the tourney that included rounds of 3-under 68 in the firs, 4-under 67 in the second and 1-undre 70 in the third rounds.
LSU is looking to improve upon its sixth-place finish in the final team standings in the 2009 edition of the Hootie at Bulls Bay Intercollegiate when the Tigers posted a 1-under par score of 851 for 54 holes. LSU’s best finish in the event all-time was a fifth-place finish in its inaugural season in 2005.
The Tigers are coming off a ninth-place finish at the Schenkel/E-Z-Go Invitational in Statesboro, Ga., just one week ago on March 21. They also recorded consecutive finishes of second place at the John Hayt Invitational in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., back on March 2 and first place at the Louisiana Classics event in Lafayette on March 9 as they are set to compete for the fourth time this month.
Third-ranked Augusta State will look to defend its team title at the Hootie after taking the championship a year ago with a score of 17-under 835. Virginia finished a distant second at 9-under 843.
South Carolina senior George Bryan IV is the top returning individual to this year’s event after picking up a runner-up finish last spring with a 54-hole score of 12-under 201. Former Augusta State Jaguar standout Janne Kaske broke 200 for three rounds to win medalist honors with a score of 14-under par 199.