Staff Report
The UNM women’s golf team, fresh off winning its second straight Mountain West Conference Championship, is preparing for a postseason run in the NCAA East Regional Tournament.
The Lobos earned an automatic bid by virtue of its conference championship and will play in the East Regional at Finley Golf Course in Chapel Hill, N.C., May 10-12. The regional is a three-day, 54-hole tournament, and the top eight teams advance to the NCAA Championship on May 22-25. The Central Regional is being held in West Lafayette, Ind., and the West Regional is being held in Corvallis, Ore.
The East region’s top seed, top-ranked Duke University, is the favorite. Finley Golf Course is close to Duke’s home in Durham, N.C., and the Blue Devils boast three of the top 20 players in the nation. Candy Hannemann is the nation’s fourth-ranked player, Virada Nirapathpongporn is ranked seventh and Kalen Anderson is ranked 19th in the latest Golfweek/Sagarin Performance Index. Duke recently won its sixth consecutive Atlantic Coast Conference Championship and has posted a 120-3 overall record in head-to-head competition this year.
The 26th-ranked Lobos counter with 79th-ranked senior Ryley Webb, who won the individual championship at the Mountain West Tournament for her first tournament win as a Lobo. Freshman Kristi Larsen is ranked 113th, junior Claudia Ferrini is ranked 142nd and senior Elisa Kase, who finished one stroke behind Webb in the conference tournament, is ranked 146th.
In addition to Duke, UNM will face other tough competition. Fifth-ranked Auburn University, which features the second-ranked individual player in the nation in Celeste Troche; sixth-ranked Georgia University; 11th-ranked Pepperdine University; and 15th-ranked Texas Christian University fill out the field. 53rd-ranked San Diego State University, one of UNM’s Mountain West foes, also got a bid to the East Regional.
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