The men’s golf team will compete in the Marshall University Invitational today and tomorrow in Huntington, W. Va., while the women’s golf team will competes April 7 and April 8 in its second meet of the season, the Western Michigan Invitational at Mt. Pleasant, Mich.
The BG men are coming off of a 10th-place finish two weeks ago at the Pepsi Intercollegiate, where they shot a combined three-round score of 927. The BG women finished 10th with a combined two-round score of 652 three weeks ago at the Northern Illinois Invitational. Both teams will be competing with other MAC schools at this weekend’s meets.
Senior Justin Gillham, freshman Austin Chase, and junior Adam Balls all placed in the top 50 at the Pepsi Intercollegiate meet. Earlier this week, Chase and Balls were ranked in the top 15 Canadian collegiate golfers. Chase is ranked ninth while Balls is ranked 14th.
“As far as our goals for the meet, I would like to be in the top 10 teams,” men’s coach Gary Winger said. “This will be the best field we’ve competed with in the past few years.”
The team will compete against eight other schools from the MAC in addition to squads from the Big Ten, the University of Kentucky, Louisville, and Notre Dame.
On the women’s side, junior Shelly Binzel will try to improve on her seventh-place finish from the Northern Illinois meet, while Coach Kurt Thomas will look for sophomore Jenny Schnipke to step up and play well.
The meet will include four or five MAC schools in addition to schools from other conferences.
“We have to be competitive because it has been a difficult start for us, because of the weather conditions we’ve gone through here after returning from Florida,” Thomas said. “We haven’t had a lot of time outside. We’ve still been practicing in the bad weather but it depends what kind of weather we get up there.”
