HILTON HEAD ISLAND, Sc. — The No. 28-ranked Georgia women’s golf team posted a 6-over 290 in Wednesday’s final round of the Darius Rucker Collegiate, pushing the Bulldogs up to sixth in a stacked field at Long Cove Club. The tournament featured six top-10 and 11 top-25 teams.
Georgia tied with No. 4 LSU and No. 7 Texas at 12-over 864. No. 20 Arizona State won the team title at 3-over 855, edging No. 12 Northwestern by a stroke. No. 11 Auburn was third at 857, and rounding out the top-10 teams were No. 6 Arkansas at 859, the Bulldogs, Tigers and Longhorns all at 864 and No. 2 Wake Forest and No. 18 Duke at 865.
“We’ve shown this week that we truly have the potential to win a national championship,” head coach Josh Brewer said. “We just have to clean up one or two things, and we know we can compete with any team in the nation.”
LoraLie Cowart became the third Bulldog in as many days to post Georgia’s low round. She carded a 1-under 70, with additional counting scores of 72 from Natachanok “Drive” Tunwannarux, 73 from Caterina Don and 75 from Savannah De Bock.
“We have shown we have the depth where anyone in our lineup can get it in the red and put up a low number,” Brewer said. “We played some really good golf here, individually and as a team.”
Cowart continued a breakout junior season. She notched her 10th par-or-better score in 22 rounds this season. Cowart had three par-or-better efforts in 42 combined rounds during her first two seasons in Athens.
Don was Georgia’s top finisher on the individual leaderboard for the seventh time in eight tournaments this season. She tied for 16th at 1-over 214, followed by Tunwannarux tying for 38th at 218, Cowart and De Bock both tying for 40th at 219 and Isabella Holpfer tying for 82nd at 234.
Georgia began Wednesday in seventh and approached the day is if it was the fourth round of the NCAA Championships. There, the top eight teams advance to a match play bracket to determine the national champion following 72 holes to stroke play.
“We try to use the regular season to get ready for the time of year when you feel this type of pressure and other teams feel this type of pressure,” Brewer said. “We emulated that today with success. We talked about it before the round. We wanted to put pressure on ourselves to perform and see how we would respond. We can use today going forward as something we’ve seen and done when we need to put up a good round at SECs, Regionals or nationals.”
Georgia will continue an extremely busy March that includes four tournaments when the Bulldogs open play at the Valspar Invitational at Forest Hills Golf Club in Augusta on Friday.