BATON ROUGE – Just three weeks after being named a semifinalist for the Ben Hogan Award, LSU’s sophomore All-American Sam Burns was chosen as a semifinalist for the 2017 NCAA Division I Jack Nicklaus National Player of the Year Award presented by Barbasol as announced by the Golf Coaches Association of America.
The finalists for the award will be revealed May 25 before the start of the 2017 NCAA Division I Men’s Golf Championships with the winner being announced at Muirfield Village Golf Club on June 1 in a ceremony during the final round of the Memorial Tournament presented by Nationwide. The award will be presented by Jack Nicklaus himself.
In addition to receiving the Jack Nicklaus National Player of the Year Award, recipients will compete in the Barbasol Shootout for an exemption into the PGA TOUR’s Barbasol Championship running July 20-23 on Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail’s Grand National in Opelika, Alabama.
The Barbasol Shootout is scheduled for Saturday, June 3, at the Scioto Country Club in Columbia, Ohio, where Nicklaus first learned the game of golf as a boy before becoming one of the legends of the game.
Also a leading candidate for the Haskins Award and a recent selection to Team USA’s Arnold Palmer Cup squad in April, Burns has played like a National Player of the Year candidate throughout the 2016-17 season as he has helped the Tigers secure a No. 3 national ranking in the Golfweek/Sagarin Performance Index ahead of NCAA Regional play.
The No. 2-ranked player in college golf in both the Golfstat and Golfweek individual player ranking, Burns recently ran his streak of top-10 tournament finishes to 13-straight in 13 appearances this season after tying for ninth place at the SEC Men’s Golf Championships two weeks ago. Among his 13 top-10 finishes this year are two wins in LSU’s team events as he was crowned a co-champion of the David Toms Intercollegiate in the fall before also taking the individual title at the Louisiana Classics in Lafayette this spring.
Burns has also been impressive in amateur play this season as he also made history in November as the first LSU Tiger to win the Sun Bowl Western Refining College All-America Golf Classic in El Paso, Texas.
A native of Shreveport, Louisiana, Burns is in the midst of a historic sophomore season at LSU with a team-leading scoring average of 69.69 strokes per round through his 13 tournament appearances. He is a cumulative 62-under par in those 13 previous starts with 29 of his 36 collegiate rounds at par or better during the 2016-17 season.
2017 Jack Nicklaus Award Semifinalists
Player, School
Dawson Armstrong, Lipscomb
Sam Burns, LSU
Cameron Champ, Texas A&M
Wyndham Clark, Oregon
Sean Crocker, Southern California
Cristobal Del Solar, Florida State
Jared du Toit, Arizona State
Doug Ghim, Texas
Nick Hardy, Illinois
Rico Hoey, Southern California
Sam Horsfield, Florida
Theo Humphrey, Vanderbilt
Patrick Martin, Vanderbilt
Maverick McNealy, Stanford
Dylan Meyer, Illinois
Collin Morikawa, California
Kyle Mueller, Michigan
John Oda, UNLV
Zachary Olsen, Oklahoma State
Chandler Phillips, Texas A&M
Doc Redman, Clemson
Matthias Schwab, Vanderbilt
Greyson Sigg, Georgia
Jimmy Stanger, Virginia
Sahith Theegala, Pepperdine
Braden Thornberry, Ole Miss
Alejandro Tosti, Florida
Dylan Wu, Northwestern
Norman Xiong, Oregon
Will Zalatoris, Wake Forest