Kansas opens spring season at Sugar Bowl Invitational

LAWRENCE, Kan. – The Kansas women’s golf team will travel to New Orleans, Louisiana, to kick off its spring season at the three-day Sugar Bowl Invitational starting Sunday.

Kansas had an exciting offseason with the finishing of the squad’s new indoor training facility at The Jayhawk Club. The Jayhawks also look forward to expanding upon their strong fall season where they took home the gold at the Nebraska Invitational in October and had a second-place finish at the Marilynn Smith Invitational.

“It’s helped being able to get into our new facility,” said head coach Erin O’Neil. “We’ve been able to work on putting and chipping a lot here in the last couple of weeks, so I’m hoping that will pay dividends when we go play. Normally, we haven’t been able to do that and that’s the first thing to go, so we focused a bunch on that.”

The Jayhawks will be led by Yi-Tsen Chou, Ariadna Fonseca Diaz, Xinyun Yu, Chomchana Phuchanbanchob and Victoria Chandra. Yu will make her first team appearance after competing as an individual at the Nebraska Invitational in October where she finished in a tie for 16th place.

“Xinyun has been a nice surprise for us,” said O’Neil. “She’s shown some good progress, she’s a pretty good ball striker and we’re hoping that getting some playing experience will help her keep improving and that we’ll see good things from her.”

Kansas will face tough competition at the Sugar Bowl Invitational against five top-25 teams including fellow Big 12 competitor No. 8 Oklahoma State.

“It’s a really strong field,” said O’Neil. “It’s a great field for us. We will get to play against the best and kind of see where we are (at) and what we need to do. I think usually it’s a good way for them to see they`re not that far from being where they want to be.”

Along with the tough field, the course itself could cause the Jayhawks an extra challenge.

“The greens are tough and you can kind of get some tight lies,” O’Neil explained. “It’s dormant Bermuda so the lies can be kind of iffy on the fairways but it’s a great course, it’s a good setup and a good challenge.”

The Jayhawks will tee off for the first round at 9 a.m., Sunday. Live scoring updates will be available on golfstat.com.

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