It’s a good time to be a college golfer.
A week after St. Andrews Links’ Old Course hosted a U.S. college event for the first time ever, two more venerable layouts will host college tournaments starting Monday: Atlanta Athletic Club and Cypress Point.
Atlanta Athletic Club’s Highlands Course, site of three PGA Championships and a U.S. Open, will host this year’s East Lake Cup because of restoration work at East Lake. The reigning NCAA semifinalists on the men’s side – Florida, Georgia Tech, North Carolina and Florida State – and women’s side – Wake Forest, USC, Stanford and Texas A&M – will compete in the three-day event, which will be televised on Golf Channel.
The format for the East Lake Cup is 18 holes of stroke play on Monday to determine the match-play seeds, and then two rounds of match play the next two days.
The Lady Trojans are coming off a huge victory at Stanford’s event, which they played without key players Amari Avery and Christine Wang because of LPGA Q-School. Avery is back in the lineup for East Lake. For Stanford, senior Rachel Heck will miss her second tournament in three events – she’s set to rep the U.S. in the PanAm Games – while Texas A&M will be without its stud freshman Cayetana Fernandez Garcia-Poggio and statistically its best player of the fall, Adela Cernousek.
Matthew Kress is the only player competing for Florida who was on the Gators’ NCAA title-winning squad from last season. North Carolina, one of the top teams in the country, gets David Ford back from the World Amateur Team Championship, though top-10 amateur Dylan Menante is set to miss, also for the PanAm Games. Florida State is without senior Cole Anderson while Georgia Tech might be the most interesting story; the Yellow Jackets have five players, led by Christo Lamprecht and Bartley Forrester, at East Lake while their other six compete on the Monterey Peninsula.
The Cypress Point Classic, typically held every few years and being played for the first time since 2019, will feature a loaded men’s field that includes host Stanford, Arizona State, Auburn, Texas, Tennessee, Illinois, Pepperdine and Georgia Tech, which will round out its six-man lineup with Colson Brown, a walk-on quarterback for the Jackets’ football team. The Sun Devils are without Preston Summerhays, who is competing in this week’s PGA Tour event in Cabo.
The Tigers are likely the favorites with Summerhays out as freshman Jackson Koivun has led Auburn to third in the Coaches Poll. The Tigers are one of three teams receiving first-place votes along with No. 1 North Carolina and No. 2 Vanderbilt.
The format is team match play, one four-ball session and one foursomes session, on Monday followed by singles match play on Tuesday.
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