“Play Wagon Wheel!”: Women’s Golf at Darius Rucker Intercollegiate

The Men’s Team was in Cabo last week, and now the Women’s Team is in Hilton Head, SC, playing in the best tournament of the week hosted by a huge celebrity. Maybe we chose the wrong path for our lives?

Starting today, the Commodores tee off in the Darius Rucker Intercollegiate against 16 other teams, including 12 ranked in the Top25 and six SEC teams. Additionally the No. 1 ranked Texas Longhorns are in the field.

The Dores

Good for the Dores because they are ready to show out. If you read my interview with Head Coach Greg Allen, you’ll know he feels strongly that this team is deeper than they get credit for. Only ranked 20th, this team has two Top 100 players, who will also be participating in the Augusta National Women’s Amateur.

They also have two other upperclassmen who have turned the corner in their career in Morgan Baxendale and Louise Yu. If they can get one or two solid scores out of their freshmen, then the ‘Dores should be able to compete in the upper tier of the conference, and hopefully the country.

This week is an important first step.

The Course

The host course, Long Cove Club, is a private residential course along the coast of South Carolina. It’s a Top 100 Residential and Modern Golf Course by Golfweek. It was designed by Pete Dye, which means it’s really hard.

The women will play it from just under 5,800 yards. At that length the course rating is 74.7. Yikes! That means this women will be lucky to score at par. And with the cold front that moved through, the course will play longer. The only hope is that rain didn’t soften it up and maybe they can play it along the ground.

The Field

The field is stacked. Among the 17 teams, the ranked teams are Alabama (13), Arkansas (18), Auburn (19), Baylor (20), Duke (6), FSU (21), LSU (12), USCe (4), Texas (1), UCLA (14), and Wake Forest (7).

The Top players are Ingrid Lindblad (1), Kaitlyn Papp (4), Sophie Guo (5), Pau Roussin-Bouchard (7), Emma Spitz (9), Ana Belac (10), Rachel Kuehn (11), Natalie Srinivasan (14).

You get it, it’s a loaded field.

You can follow along live scoring here.