BATON ROUGE – The LSU men’s golf team is set to compete in its third tournament in as many weeks as it wraps up the 2011 fall campaign with a trip to Isleworth Golf and Country Club in Windermere, Fla., to tee it up in the prestigious Isleworth Collegiate Invitational beginning Sunday morning.
The first round of the three-day, 54-hole championship will be held 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 tournament that features an elite 15-team field.
The event features an NCAA Championships caliber field with five of the Top 10 and eight of the Top 20 teams in the Golfstat Top 25 slated to compete this week at Isleworth Golf and Country Club.
The Tigers will join such nationally-ranked squads as No. 1 Texas, No. 3 Stanford, No. 5 Alabama, No. 9 Oklahoma State, No. 10 California, No. 11 North Florida, No. 16 Central Florida and No. 21 Illinois. The tournament also features Augusta State, Florida, Ohio State, TCU, Texas Tech and Vanderbilt.
Live scoring of the event will be provided by Golfstat throughout the week and can be found online at the organization’s official tournament website at www.golfstat.com.
The Tigers are coming off a season best fourth-place finish at the third-annual David Toms Intercollegiate held earlier this week as they played host to the event at Southern Trace Country Club in Shreveport. That performance followed an eighth-place finish at the Carpet Capital Collegiate Classic on Sept. 9-11 in their season opener and a seventh-place finish at the Jack Nicklaus Invitational on Oct. 10-11.
LSU returns to the site of one of its most impressive performances a year ago when it took home a runner-up finish at the Isleworth Collegiate Invitational with a 54-hole score of 22-over par 886. The Tigers were just two shots behind the winning score of 20-over 884 by 2010 champion Alabama.
Senior Sang Yi is LSU’s top returning performer from a year ago when he earned his best event finish for the season by tying for 11th place on the leaderboard with a tournament score of 5-over par 221.
Yi is off to a fast start to his senior season as he has posted a pair of top-10 finishes in three tourney starts for the Tigers this season. After firing an impressive 5-under 211 in matching his career-best finish with a tie for third place at the Carpet Capital Collegiate Classic, Yi tied for sixth place on the leaderboard at the David Toms Intercollegiate in his last start earlier this week.
Yi enters the tournament as the team’s leading scorer with a 72.2 scoring average in 10 rounds played this season as six of his 10 rounds have been played at par or better.
Joining Yi in LSU’s starting lineup at the Isleworth Collegiate Invitational are sophomores Landon Lyons and Andrew Presley and freshmen Stewart Jolly and Curtis Thompson. Both Presley and Thompson are making their fourth tournament start of the fall campaign, while Lyons is making his second start with the Tigers and Jolly is making his collegiate debut as part of LSU’s starting lineup this year.
The Tigers will compete with California and Texas Tech in the opening round of the Isleworth Collegiate Invitational as they tee off from the back nine beginning at 7:25 a.m. CDT. Tee times in the second round on Monday and final round on Tuesday will be determined at the end of each day of competition.