DUBLIN, Ohio — The LSU women’s golf team was supposed to get a chance to test out the newly renovated Scarlet Course at The Ohio State University in this year’s Lady Buckeye Invitational, but that won’t be the case when the teams tee off on Saturday.
The course remains closed to competition to allow it to be as good as possible for the NCAA Division I Women’s Golf Championships in late May, so the field will compete on another strong area course, The Golf Club of Dublin.
The Lady Tigers are coming off a seventh place finish in the NCAA Women’s Golf Championships, a tournament in which they shot their third best score of the season. LSU is presently ranked 30 in the Golfweek/Sagarin Performance Index. In the SECs, LSU junior Melissa Eaton posted her third top five finish of the season by finishing in a tie for fifth at the conference championship for the second consecutive year after shooting rounds of 76-76-68 — 220 (four over par).
In the field with LSU and host Ohio State are SEC Champion Auburn along with Florida, Georgia State, Illinois, Indiana, Kent State, Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern, Penn State, Purdue and Wisconsin. Michigan State is the defending champion of the event with a three-round total of 886. Lindsay Knowlton of Ohio State won the individual competition with a two-under 214.
LSU will use the same lineup that it used last week in the Championships with Eaton being joined by sophomores Alexis Rather, Rebecca Kuhn and Kim Meck and freshman Caroline Martens.
The event will be a 36-hole shotgun start Saturday at 7:30 a.m. CST with the final round scheduled to begin at the same time on Sunday.
“We did some good things last week and were very close to finishing much higher at SECs,” said Coach Karen Bahnsen. “We need to play much better down the stretch than we did last week when we cost ourselves a lot of strokes.”