BATON ROUGE – After winning two tournament championships in its first three events of the 2010-11 season, the 12th-ranked LSU men’s golf team will wrap up the fall season with a trip to Windermere, Fla., to compete in one of the elite collegiate events of the year at the Isleworth Collegiate Invitational that will begin Sunday morning at Isleworth Golf & Country Club.
The 54-hole tournament will be contested over three days with the first round on Sunday, followed by the second round on Monday and the third and final round on Tuesday. The course will play to a par 72 and a lengthy 7,544 yards for the championship that features a strong 15-team field.
Live scoring of the event will be provided throughout the week by Golfstat and can be found online at the organization’s official tournament website at www.golfstat.com.
The Tigers are just four days removed from a two-stroke win in their own David Toms Intercollegiate this week as they fired a 54-hole score of 16-under par 848 at The Country Club of Louisiana to pick up a title over the Arkansas Razorbacks and the rest of the 14-team field on Tuesday.
LSU also opened the 2010-11 season by winning the team title at the Gopher Invitational held Sept. 11-12 at Spring Hill Golf Club in Wayzata, Minn., for their eighth win in the last two-plus seasons.
“The team is looking forward to getting back out on the course and playing in one of the most prestigious events in all of college golf,” said LSU head coach Chuck Winstead. “The combination of course and competition is tremendous here at Isleworth, and I know our guys are looking forward to the challenge. It is going to be a great event, and we are honored to be a part of it this year.”
The Tigers will tee off as the No. 12-ranked team in the country in the latest Golfstat Top 25 poll released Thursday. LSU is also ranked No. 9 nationally in the last published Golfweek/Sagarin Performance Index from Oct. 18 before the team took the title at the David Toms Intercollegiate.
The seventh-annual Isleworth Collegiate Invitational will feature one of the deepest fields of the season in college golf as 10 of the 15 teams enter the event ranked among the Top 30 nationally by Golfstat.
The No. 12-ranked Tigers will be joined in this year’s 15-team field by tournament host and No. 22-ranked Texas Tech, No. 1 Florida, No. 2 Oklahoma State, No. 5 Alabama, No. 6 Texas, No. 10 Georgia, No. 18 Stanford, No. 21 Ohio State and No. 29 Central Florida. Rounding out the field during the event is Arizona, Southern Methodist, TCU, Tennessee and Vanderbilt.
The Oklahoma State Cowboys are the defending champions of the Isleworth Collegiate Invitational with a five-stroke victory over Florida for the team title in last year’s event. The NCAA runners-up in 2010 enter the event as the favorite after winning two team titles this fall, including the PING/Golfweek Preview.
Alabama junior All-American Bud Cauley will return to the Isleworth Collegiate Invitational this week to defend the individual championship that he won a season ago.
The Tigers will compete with an experienced lineup including five upperclassmen as seniors Ken Looper, Andrew Loupe and John Peterson will team with juniors Austin Gutgsell and Sang Yi will hit the links on Sunday morning during the tournament’s opening round of competition.
Looper has led the way for the Tigers throughout the fall season while finishing among the final top seven individuals in each of his three events on the year. He finished in a tie for second place on the leaderboard at the David Toms Intercollegiate with a season-low score of 6-under par 210. Looper also tied for second place at the Squire Creek Invitational and tied for seventh place at the Gopher Invitational.
Looper has fired rounds of par or better in six of his nine competitive rounds on the year, while posting an impressive team-leading 71.7 scoring average in three tournament appearances.
Gutgsell is playing with confidence after earning his first career victory at the David Toms Intercollegiate, where he fired a career-low 10-under 206 to finish four shots clear of the field atop the leaderboard. As he played as an individual, Gutgsell sandwiched a career-low 4-under par 68 in the second round between an impressive pair of 3-under 69s to take the title at The Country Club of Louisiana.
Peterson finished in a tie for second place with Looper at 6-under 201 to earn his second top-10 finish this fall, while Loupe recorded his first top-10 finish of the year by tying for eighth place at 4-under 212.
The Tigers are paired with Central Florida and SMU in Sunday’s opening round of the seventh-annual Isleworth Collegiate Invitational and will tee off from the front nine beginning at 7:50 a.m. CT. Tee times for Monday’s second round will be determined after first-round results are final.