UK Women’s Golf Begins Postseason Play at SEC Championship
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – The postseason is upon the Kentucky women’s golf team this weekend at the Southeastern Conference Championship. A 10-event, seven-month regular season will give way to the annual conference tournament in Birmingham, Alabama, for the league title.
The tournament will tee off Wednesday at 9 a.m. ET with the first of three rounds of stroke play, scheduled for Wednesday through Friday.
For the second consecutive season, the tournament will feature match play. The top eight teams from the 54-hole, three-day stroke play will advance to the weekend. The quarterfinals and semifinals will take place Saturday with the championship match scheduled for Sunday.
The format reflects the NCAA Championships format.
“We are excited to get to Birmingham this week and test our game against some of the best teams in the country,” said UK assistant Brian May, who is filling in for head coach Golda Borst (maternity leave) this week. “This season has presented a lot of opportunities for our team to learn. Each girl on this team has grown so much this year and our games are at another level because of our past experiences.
“We were very close to putting a good finish together at Clemson, but we couldn’t close out the rounds. With another experience to draw from, and a week of good practice at home, I believe this team is ready to compete with the top teams in the conference and the country.”
Live scoring will be available throughout the week at Golfstat.com.
Hoping to further their season, a strong showing at this week’s annual competition at the Greystone Golf & Country Club would go a long way in making NCAA postseason play for the seventh time in the nine-season Borst era at UK.
Ranked No. 62 by Golfstat heading into this week, Kentucky will likely need to move up a handful of spots to earn an at-large berth when the NCAA regional field is announced next week. The good news is, in a conference as difficult as the SEC, there will be plenty of opportunities to do just that.
Annually in the mix as the nation’s best conference, this year’s SEC Championship features four teams ranked in the top 10, six in the top 25 and 11 in the top 50. If UK can slide past some of those teams and get into match play, the Wildcats like their chances of making some noise on the weekend.
All eight teams that advanced to last season’s match play made the NCAA regional field. UK was left out of match play by just one spot.
Kentucky will take a veteran lineup to Birmingham this week with senior Leonie Bettel, junior Sarah Shipley, sophomore Rikke Svejgård Nielsen, senior Claire Carlin and sophomore Casey Ott. They own UK’s best five stroke averages during the 2018-19 season and have combined for 16 of the Wildcats’ 19 top-20 showings this season.
Of course, Bettel owns seven of those, the latest coming last week at the Clemson Invitational at Lake Keowee, where Bettel tied for 15th place. Bettel tied Isabelle Johansson’s 2016-17 single-season record with her 12th round of par or better in the second round. She’s also on pace to break Johansson’s single-season stroke record.
But the three-time 2018-19 champion has bigger goals on her mind this week, most importantly continuing her UK career beyond this week’s SEC Tournament.
Carlin, Kentucky’s senior captain, would like to do the same. She’s appearing in her career-high ninth event this season but her first SEC Championship.
If the Wildcats can advance to the weekend, they’ll have an ace up their sleeve in Shipley. She’s 4-0 in her career in match play, including a victory earlier this season vs. Louisville. Shipley tied for 13th at last year’s SEC Championship and tied for 26th last weekend at the Clemson Invitational. She was poised for an even better finish after a five-birdie final round that was ultimately canceled and nullified by inclement weather.
Svejgård Nielsen is behind only Bettel with four top-20 finishes, including two this spring. She fired a pair of 74s in Sunset, South Carolina, last week.
Ott, a freshman, earned the fifth and final spot. She will try to regain her earlier spring form when she posted back-to-back top-10 finishes at the Reynolds Lake Oconee Collegiate Championship and the Gold Rush Invitational.
UK had a 36-hole team score of 584 last week before thunderstorms canceled the final round. The 584 was the Wildcats’ second-best 36-hole mark of the season, behind only their Bettie Lou Evans Invitational pace that resulted in a team championship.
The SEC Championship will return to the Greystone Golf & Country Club’s Legacy Course, a par 72 that plays at 6,253 yards. The Legacy Course is carved naturally from a visually dramatic landscape of placid lakes, meandering streams and the undulation of Alabama’s Appalachian foothills. Designed by world-famous architect Rees Jones, each hole is an inviting yet demanding contest. The Zoysia fairways and Bent Grass greens found at Legacy provide golfers with surfaces that are both challenging and rewarding.
Kentucky has finished as high as second in the SEC Championship but has never won it. The Wildcats’ highest finish in the Borst era is fifth. UK’s 885 in in the 2017 tournament was its best 54-hole score in the event’s history.
For the latest on the Kentucky women’s golf team, follow the team on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, as well as on the web at UKathletics.com.
