BATON ROUGE – After opening their 2016 fall season with a fourth-place team finish at the 26th-annual Carpet Capital Collegiate Classic two weeks ago, No. 7-ranked LSU continues its campaign with a trip to Scottsdale, Arizona, where they will compete at this year’s Maui Jim Intercollegiate beginning Friday at Mirabel Golf Club.
This marks the inaugural season of the Maui Jim Intercollegiate as the three-day, 54-hole championship starts Friday at 8:50 a.m. CT. Tee times for the second round on Saturday are also scheduled to begin at 8:50 a.m., while Sunday’s final round is set to get underway for the first time at 9 a.m.
Mirabel Golf Club is a Tom Fazio design that will play to a par 71 and 7,147 yards for the championship. The front nine is a par 36 that plays 3,556 yards, while the back nine is a par 35 set at 3,591 yards.
The Field
While the Maui Jim Intercollegiate is to be contested at Mirabel Golf Club in Scottsdale, Arizona, Georgia State University will play host to the event with seven NCAA Championship qualifiers from a season ago and five teams ranked in the Bushnell Golfweek Preseason Coaches’ Top 25 Poll featured in the field of 16 teams.
No. 7-ranked LSU is the highest nationally-ranked team from the preseason in the field after also advancing to the national quarterfinals of match play at the 2016 NCAA Division I Men’s Golf Championships. Preseason No. 17-ranked South Carolina was also a match-play qualifier at the NCAA Championships last spring where the Gamecocks also appeared in the quarterfinals.
Following the Tigers as the second-highest-ranked team in the field at Mirabel Golf Club is preseason No. 11-ranked California, which tied for 10th place in 72 holes of stroke play at the NCAA Championships in May. No. 22-ranked South Florida, No. 24-ranked Baylor, Houston and UAB were NCAA Championship qualifiers a year ago, but make the 15-team cut for the final round after three rounds of stroke play.
Rounding out the field competing for the team championship at the Maui Jim Intercollegiate this weekend is Augusta, Chattanooga, Grand Canyon, Georgia Tech, Hawaii, Kansas, Kent State and Notre Dame.
The Lineup
LSU’s All-American quartet of seniors Brandon Pierce and Eric Ricard and sophomores Sam Burns and Luis Gagne make their return to the lineup for the Maui Jim Intercollegiate after leading the Tigers to a fourth-place team finish in their season opener at the Carpet Capital Collegiate Classic two weeks ago.
Burns is off to a blistering start this season after tying for sixth place in the event held at The Farm Golf Club with a career-low tournament score of 8-under par 208 in his first three rounds of the year. Burns took home a top-10 individual finish in a 54-hole event for the first time in his collegiate career thanks in part to a career-low round of 7-under 65 in the second round.
Gagne, a match-play quarterfinalist at the 116th United States Amateur Championship in the summer, cracked the Top 20 in the opening event of his sophomore season with a tie for 19th place two weeks ago.
Pierce and Ricard tied one another for 27th place in the final leaderboard at the Carpet Capital Collegiate Classic where they posted matching tournament scores of 1-over par 217 in 54 holes. Ricard is LSU’s active career leader with seven top-10 collegiate finishes, including two tournament titles as an LSU Tiger, while Pierce follows six career top-10 finishes.
Sophomore Nathan Jeansonne is set to make his season debut at the Maui Jim Intercollegiate this week after making five appearances as a freshman a year ago as he will join his teammates as part of LSU’s five-player lineup competing for the team title. In 14 competitive rounds played as a freshman in 2015-16, Jeansonne averaged 72.93 strokes per round while earning one top-10 and three top-20 finishes.
Also competing for the Tigers as an individual at the Maui Jim Intercollegiate is senior Rhyne Jones, who tied for 45th place in the lineup at the Carpet Capital Collegiate Classic in his season debut two weeks ago.
First-Round Pairings
The Tigers will tee off alongside Kansas and Kent State in the first wave off the back nine in Friday’s first round as tee times are set to begin at 10 a.m. CT and run through 10:48 a.m. Pairings for Saturday’s second round and Sunday’s final round will be determined following the conclusion of each round based on the overall team standings.
Fans can follow the Tigers in action by accessing Golfstat’s live scoring at http://www.golfstat.com. Live updates throughout the Maui Jim Intercollegiate are also available through the official Twitter page of LSU Men’s Golf at http://twitter.com/lsumensgolf as fans can follow @LSUMensGolf.
What’s Next?
After teeing off at the Maui Jim Intercollegiate at Mirabel Golf Club for the first time this weekend, the Tigers will return home to the University Club in Baton Rouge in two weeks as they play host to the eighth-annual David Toms Intercollegiate from Oct. 8-9. They continue the 2016 fall season at the Golf Club of Georgia Collegiate in Alpharetta from Oct. 21-23 before wrapping up the fall campaign with their debut appearance at the Ka’anapali Collegiate Classic at Ka’anapali Golf Club in Lahaina, Hawaii, from Nov. 4-6.