Lady Toppers prepare for C-USA Championships

Jonah Phillips

This weekend the Lady Topper golf team will travel to Fort Myers, Florida, to compete in the Conference USA Championships from April 18-20.

The championships come off the back of an abject showing at the Lady Rebel Intercollegiate hosted by Ole Miss on April 1-3.

In Oxford, Mississippi, the Lady Toppers managed just an 11th place finish in a field of 15 and behind fellow C-USA member Southern Miss.

With the 11th place finish behind them, the Lady Toppers will attempt to draw inspiration from some of their other, more encouraging performances from this spring campaign.

These include a second place finish at the John Kirk Panther Intercollegiate hosted by Georgia State in late March and a tie for first place one week before Georgia State in the Citrus Challenge Invitational hosted by Morehead State.

Second-year WKU Head Coach Adam Gary will rely on sophomores Georgina Blackman of Essex, England, and Katie Story of Dickson, Tennessee, to keep the scores low.

Seniors Michaela Bordeianu and Ellinor Haag, both of Sweden, will also look to keep the scores small, and as the squad’s only seniors, they will look to provide some leadership to a roster with just one other upperclassman in Italian junior Daniela Galassi. The other five Lady Toppers are all sophomores.

Story will complete her first full campaign since transferring from Belmont and will look to build off her best showing as a Lady Topper: an eighth overall finish at the John Kirk Panther Intercollegiate.

While the Rebel Intercollegiate two weeks ago did not see any Lady Toppers finish in the top 25, the team did see sophomore Emily Alexander lead the Lady Toppers with a score of 13 over par, which tied her for 30th place.

Alexander’s highest finish for WKU at Ole Miss wasn’t a first for the sophomore.

Alexander, a Glasgow native, pulled in the Lady Toppers’ only C-USA Women’s Golfer of the Week award on the week of March 23 for the spring campaign after leading the squad in scoring when she tied for eighth in a field of 118.

While the honor is the only one any of the Lady Toppers have come by this spring, Haag earned it last spring in early March.

According to golfstat.com, which ranks every D-I program from best to worst from No. 1 to No. 255, WKU is the fifth best team in C-USA with a national power ranking of 117.

According to golfstat.com, Florida International comes in at 94, the University of Texas, San Antonio at 80 and Old Dominion at 78 while Middle Tennessee leads C-USA as the 55th best team in the nation.