BATON ROUGE – The LSU women’s golf team returns to action for the third time in the fall portion of the season when it travels to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for the annual Ruth’s Chris Tar Heel Invitational starting Friday at the UNC Finley Golf Course.
The Finley Golf Course is expected to be ready even after some of the heavy rains that fell in that area which forced cancellation of the men’s event over the same course last weekend. The weather is expected to be in the low 80s on Friday for the opening round with cooler temperatures on the weekend and rain in the forecast for Saturday.
Besides LSU, the Tar Heels will host Duke, NC State, Wake Forest, Virginia, Rollins, Tennessee, UNC-Wilmington, Oregon, Alabama, Kentucky, LSU, Baylor, Louisville, Michigan State, Auburn, South Carolina and Arkansas. A total of 13 teams of the 18-team field are ranked in Golfweek’s top-50 rankings. Duke returns as the defending champion of the Ruth’s Chris Tar Heel Invitational.
A total of 14 teams from last year are back for the event with the only newcomers being Kentucky, UNC-Wilmington, Tennessee and Baylor.
LSU will go with a lineup of Nadine Dreher, Elise Bradley, Kathleen Gallagher, Caroline Nistrup and Claudia De Antonio. De Antonio and Sydney Cavin, who will play in the individual competition, are both making their season debuts for LSU as they begin their sophomore seasons.
Dreher, the senior from Austria, leads the team in stroke average after two events at 72.83 with Bradley, a senior from Mandeville at 73.17 and Nistrup, a junior from Denmark, at 73.33. Freshman Gallagher from Greenwood, Mississippi, is averaging 74.50 through her first six rounds as a Lady Tiger.
The Lady Tigers will go off in the first wave of the Friday morning round with host North Carolina and Wake Forest at 8:09 a.m. CT off the first tee. The UNC Finley Golf Course is a par 72 and will play to 6,379 yards. The tournament runs through Sunday.
Live scoring of the event can be found at LSUsports.net through Golfstatresults.com or on the Golfstat app. Updates and recaps are available at www.facebook.com/LSUwomensgolf and on Twitter and Instagram at www.instagram.com/LSUwomensgolf.