RIO GRANDE, Puerto Rico – The LSU women’s golf season opens its busiest spring season in years on Sunday when they tee it up in the Lady Puerto Rico Invitational.
Purdue, ranked 13th, is the host of this tournament now in its 15th year. The tournament will be played at the Rio Mar Country Club for the ninth straight year and for the seventh year on the River Course designed by PGA star Greg Norman.
This will be LSU’s fifth appearance in the tournament, having own the event in 2012. LSU has played here as well in 2003, 2008 and 2015.
Joining Purdue and LSU in the event will be: Kent State, Georgia, Iowa State, TCU, Michigan, NC State, Texas Tech, Arkansas, Augusta University, Baylor, Maryland, Furman and Vanderbilt.
LSU will play five full-field events in the spring starting with this tournament that runs through Tuesday. They will return to Baton Rouge and then make the short drive on Friday to New Orleans for the Allstate Sugar Bowl Intercollegiate that will begin next Sunday, Feb. 19.
In March LSU will make its annual appearance in the Darius Rucker Intercollegiate before hosting the annual spring event, the LSU Tiger Golf Classic, at the LSU University Club in Baton Rouge. The tournament will return to a Friday-Sunday schedule this year, March 24-26.
The regular season will conclude with a trip to Arizona State for the Ping/ASU Invitational in Tempe in early April.
Coach Karen Bahnsen is excited to get the season rolling with what is a healthy LSU squad after playing most of last year without All-American Caroline Nistrup, who played in two tournaments in the fall.
“We are excited to get the spring tournament season off and running,” said Bahnsen. “The team is getting healthy and because we only played eight rounds last semester we have the bulk of our schedule this semester. “I feel this sets us up to be successful. It is great to have a healthy Caroline back and together with the rest of the team we look forward to a good spring.”
The LSU lineup will have senior Nistrup (who averaged 72.17 in the fall), sophomore Kathleen Gallagher (74.00), junior Sydney Cavin (75.56), senior Carly Goldstein and sophomore Marina Hedlund. Both will be playing their first tournaments of the year with the two having career averages of 78 strokes per round.
The tournament will be 18 holes each day with a shotgun start on Sunday at 7 a.m. CT. LSU will be paired with Maryland and Vanderbilt.
Live scoring can be found at LSUsports.net through Birdiefire.com. Updates can be found at @LSUwomensgolf on Twitter and full recap there and at www.Facebook.com/LSUwomensgolf.