BATON ROUGE — The LSU women’s golf team is looking to build momentum for the 2006 SEC Women’s Golf Championships when it travels to Browns Summitt, N.C., on Friday to compete against a strong 18-team field in the Bryan National Collegiate at Bryan Park Golf Club.
The club’s Champions Course is the host site for the event and will play to a par 72 and 6,100 yards for the championship. The course is also scheduled to be the host site of the 2006 NCAA East Regional, May 11-13.
“There’s supposed to be really good weather, and this is a very nice golf course that sets up well for us,” said LSU head coach Karen Bahnsen. “The girls are going to really try to just focus on playing some good rounds this weekend and executing our strategy of how to play this golf course, which is one that we could see again in the future.”
The Lady Tigers are going to put that strategy to the test against perhaps the strongest field they have seen this season as 10 teams enter the tournament ranked in the latest Golfstat Top 25.
Joining the Lady Tigers is No. 1 Duke, No. 7 Georgia, No. 8 Purdue, No. 10 Wake Forest, No. 12 California, No. 13 Tennessee, No. 14 Florida, No. 15 Virginia, No. 16 Vanderbilt and No. 20 Oklahoma State. Rounding out the field is the College of Charleston, Furman, North Carolina, North Carolina State, UNC-Greensboro, UNC-Wilmington and South Carolina.
Bahnsen will play with a lineup of junior Melissa Eaton, sophomores Rebecca Kuhn, Kim Meck and Alexis Rather, and freshman Caroline Martens. Martens has led the Lady Tigers in recent events as she has posted back-to-back top-10 finishes with a tie for eighth in the LSU/Cleveland Golf Classic and a tie for ninth in the Donnis Thompson Invitational earlier this month.
“Our goal is to have a strong finish in this event to put ourselves in position to earn a higher seed in the postseason than we would get at this particular time,” Bahnsen said. “We have been hurt a bit by some of our tournaments in the fall, but we’ve been playing much much better in recent weeks. We would like to have some really good finishes to end the season.”
The Lady Tigers are paired with SEC rival Florida and North Carolina in the tournament’s opening round and will tee off from the first tee beginning at 7:30 a.m. CST. Live scoring of the event throughout the day is provided by www.golfstat.com.