ATHENS, Ga. — The No. 23-ranked Georgia women’s golf team will be No. 4 seed at the Auburn Regional of the NCAA Women’s Golf Championships. The seeds and assignments for the NCAA’s six Regionals, which will be contested on May 6-8, were announced by the NCAA on Wednesday.
“It’s why you work all year,” head coach Josh Brewer said. “It’s why you start in August, and we are still practicing and trying to improve. At the SECs, we showed what we can do when he have a test. We have another test in front of us. We seem to play well under that pressure so we’re excited.”
Six Regional sites will host 54 holes of stroke play on May 6-8, with the top-5 teams and the low individual finisher who is not a member of those teams going on to compete at the NCAA Championships on May 17-22 at the Omni La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad, Calif. In addition to Auburn, Regionals will be held in Bryan, Texas; Cle Elum, Wash.; East Lansing, Mich.; Las Vegas, Nev.; and Winston-Salem, N.C.
The Bulldogs have enjoyed a steady 2023-24 season with contributions throughout the lineup. As a team, Georgia has posted par-or-better scores in 12 of 33 rounds. The Bulldogs have recorded four third-place finishes in seven spring events including each of the last three tournaments. Georgia entered a stacked SEC Championships ranked No. 23 nationally but as the No. 9 seed in the tournament. The Bulldogs finished seventh following 54 holes of stroke play qualifying and knocked off No. 10 Auburn, 3.5-1.5, in the quarterfinals of match play but then fell to No. 16 Texas A&M, 3-2, in the semifinals.
“It’s how we try to do it,” Brewer said. “You’d love to be No. 1 in August or September, but they don’t hand out the most important trophies at that time of year. We try to figure out how to peak in April or May. Now we get to see if we can continue to peak. We’ve had a good trend of doing it recently.”
Individually, Caterina Don has led Georgia in nine of 12 tournaments, posting seven top-10 and 10 10-top finishes. All told, Bulldogs have combined to post 67 par-or-better tallies in 195 individual rounds this season.
“You expect to be in because you’ve worked hard all season, but you don’t know you’re going to be in when you step foot on campus in August,” Don said. “It takes a lot of work to get here, and I think it’s worth celebrating seeing your name up there. We knew we were going to go, but it’s still exciting to see your name up there and know where you’re going to go and who you’re going to be competing with.”
Graduate transfer Napat “Jenny” Lertsadwattana played four seasons at New Mexico and finished 18th individually to lead the Lobos to a top-10 finish at last spring’s NCAA Championships. She enters this year’s nationals confident in herself and her teammates.
“We were all very excited to find out where we were going to go,” Lertsadwattana said. “We all know that wherever we go, we’re going to play well. So there’s not much anxiety about where we’re going to go. It’s more the excitement of knowing where we’re going to go next. It’s something we’ve been working toward for nine months.”
Georgia will be looking to post a fourth straight top-20 finish at the national championships. In 2021, the Bulldogs and Jenny Bae swept the NCAA Columbus Regional titles before finishing 18th at the nationals. In 2022, Georgia was third at the Albuquerque Regional and advancing to the match play portion of the national championships, eventually tying for fifth. Last spring, Georgia and Bae again swept Regional titles on UGA’s home course in Athens and went on to tie for 14th at the NCAA Championships.
“We’re going to just try to have some fun,” Brewer said. “There’s no hiding it, it’s the worst three days of the year as a coach because you’re kind of defined by it. I try to be harder on them earlier in the year and try some things to see what works and what doesn’t. Now you’ve just got to have fun. I want us to play with a smile on our face.”
The format at the NCAAs includes in three rounds of stroke play on May 17-19. The competitors will then be cut to the top-15 teams and the top-9 golfers not on advancing teams. Following a fourth round of stroke play on May 20, the individual national champion will be crowned and the top-8 teams will move on to a seeded match play bracket. Match play quarterfinals and semifinals will be on May 21, followed by the championship match on May 22.
The Bulldogs have historically been one of women’s college golf’s premier programs. Georgia has captured four national titles, winning the team title in 2001 and three individual crowns – Terri Moody in 1981, Cindy Schreyer in 1984 and Vicki Goetze in 1993. In addition, the Bulldogs have recorded 29 top-20 team finishes since 1979, including 21 top-10 performances.
Georgia also has won 10 NCAA Regional titles – six team and four individual – since that format was introduced in 1993. The Bulldogs were team champions at Regionals in 1993, 1998, 1999, 2016, 2021 and 2023. Georgia’s Regional medalists are Reilley Rankin in 1998 in Durham, N.C.; Bailey Tardy in 2016 in Bryan, Texas; and Bae in both 2021 in Columbus, Ohio and 2023 in Athens.
All told, 13 SEC teams earned Regional bids. In addition to the Bulldogs, South Carolina is the No. 1 seed and Auburn is the No. 2 seed in Auburn. LSU is the No. 1 seed in Bryan followed by Texas A&M at No. 2 and Vanderbilt at No. 4. Alabama is the No. 5 seed at Cle Plum. Florida and Kentucky are the No. 3 and No. 6 seeds, respectively, at East Lansing. Arkansas is the No. 2 seed in Las Vegas. In Winston-Salem, Ole Miss is the No. 3 seed, Mississippi State is No. 4 and Tennessee is No. 7.