Mississippi State Women's Golf Prepares For LSU Tiger Classic
BATON ROUGE, La. – Coming off their first tournament of the spring, the Mississippi State women’s golf team prepares for the LSU Tiger Golf Classic at the University Club in Baton Rouge, La. MSU finished its last tournament led by its pair of seniors, Erika Thornton and Mallory Batson. The duo finished atop the team’s individual results all three rounds of the tournament and both finished in the top 20.
The recently renovated University Club will host its first collegiate tournament on the new greens. Under its latest design, the course is a par 72. At the last Tiger Classic at the University Club in 2009, Virginia won the event with an 8-under-par 856 while Arkansas’s Lucy Nunn won in a playoff.
Making the trip for Mississippi State will be seniors Mallory Batson and Erika Thornton, sophomore Maria Roos and freshmen Esther Huffman and Mary Langdon Gallagher.
Batson enters the tournament owning MState’s second-best stroke average per round (75.63) and per tournament (226.00). She trails Thornton by less than a stroke in each of the categories. Thornton looks to maintain her streak of nine consecutive tournaments finishing atop MSU’s leaderboard.
Roos is making her fifth tournament of the year and third straight. Roos has already shown marked improvement from last season knocking multiple strokes off her round and tournament averages.
Coming off an injury, Huffman hasn’t played in a tournament since firing a 235 in the PAC 10/SEC Challenge last fall. Along with Gallagher, she has already made strong contributions to the Lady Bulldog squad as a freshman. Gallagher has yet to miss a tournament in her young college career. She owns a tie of MSU’s best tournament score (219) and has the team’s second-best tournament finish for the season (T11).
With 21 teams scheduled to participate in the event, the Lady Bulldogs will face one of its stiffest tournament fields this season. Four out of the top-5 teams in the nation are converging on Baton Rouge for the event. A total of seven teams ranked in GolfStat’s Top-25 are participating in the event including top-ranked Alabama.
“With the leadership of our two seniors, I feel good about our team at LSU,” Coach Ginger Brown-Lemm said. “It is by far our strongest tournament of the year. There are several top-20 teams in the field. It is about getting our underclassmen exposed to this type of event and I know it will pay off in the future.”
The LSU Tiger Classic will tee off at 7:51 a.m. CT on both Friday and Saturday while an 8:30 a.m. CT shotgun start is set for Sunday. The first MSU player will tee off in the bayou at 10:15 a.m. on Friday. Live stats will be available through www.MStateAthletics.com.