AUSTIN, Texas — The 20th-ranked LSU women’s golf team begins play here Thursday in one of the most important tournaments of the year, the NCAA Central Regional at the University of Texas Golf Course.
But it’s not the most important thing to win the tournament over the other 20 teams entered. What is important is that on Saturday your team is in the top eight in the team standings to advance to the NCAA Division I Women’s Golf Championships at the University of New Mexico in two weeks.
The Lady Tigers, in a regional for the fifth straight year and for the 14th time in the 16 years of regional qualifiers, will be looking to get past the regional round for the first time since 2006 and for the seventh time during Karen Bahnsen’s 24 years as the head coach.
“We are looking forward to the regional as we always do,” said Bahnsen. “The team has been practicing extremely hard and looks ready for the challenge. We like the field we were put in. This is a very difficult golf course and the scores should not be like last year when there was absolutely perfect weather at our University Club and low scores were everywhere. But we feel we are ready to be very competitive and we look forward to getting off to a good start (Thursday).”
LSU is the seventh seed and joins a field that consists of in seeding order: UCLA (No. 2 nationally), Purdue, Alabama, Denver, Kent State, Pepperdine, LSU, Texas A&M , Notre Dame, Texas, TCU, Florida State, North Carolina State, East Tennessee State, Texas Tech, Washington, Nebraska, Harvard, Texas State, Illinois State and Fairleigh-Dickinson.
The par-72 course will play 6,301 yards for the Central Regional, one of three NCAA Regionals taking place this weekend for women with the others at the University of Georgia Golf Course in Athens (East) and in the West hosted by Cal State-Sacramento. Each regional will advance eight teams and the top two individuals who are not a part of the eight qualifying teams.
LSU will have an early start on its opening round Thursday, teeing off at 8:10 a.m., paired with Texas A&M and Notre Dame.
The Lady Tigers will go with the lineup that has carried them through much of the spring semester led by the nation’s 56th ranked- player, Megan McChrystal, the freshman from Stuart, Fla. McChrystal earned second-team All-SEC honors by averaged 74.5 strokes per round.
The rest of the lineup will feature senior Rebecca Kuhn (75.3 strokes per round), junior Caroline Martens (76.3), freshman Amalie Valle (75.6) and senior Alexis Rather (76.2). Kuhn, Martens and Rather were in the lineup in 2006 when the Tigers advanced to the championship from the regionals. LSU is coming off a sixth place finish in their last start, the Southeastern Conference Championships in Loudon, Tenn.
Live scoring of the regional championships is available at LSUsports.net through Golfstat.com.