The Texas A&M women’s golf team will begin its fall season in Fayetteville, Arkansas, on Oct. 5-7 at the Blessings Collegiate Invitational.
The tournament will be broadcast live on the Golf Channel from 3:30-6:30 p.m. each day. The Blessings Golf Club will not be permitting spectators and is working closely with participants and staff to follow health department guidelines, according to Arkansasrazorback.com.
The tournament will host 14 SEC men’s and women’s programs, according to the host team website.
“A lot of the tournaments got canceled this summer, some got postponed, but our players were still able to compete in two or three events,” women’s golf coach Andrea Gaston said.
The team’s spring season was cut short in March before the Liz Murphey Collegiate Classic in Athens, Georgia, after a third-place finish in the ICON Invitational in Houston.
“We’re back into a routine, and we’ve seen some good golf,” Gaston said. “Certainly, it takes time to get it all back.”
Gaston said the team has been practicing since the end of August and all of September. Sophomore Blanca Fernández, one of three international students on the team, had to quarantine for 14 days when coming back to the states from Spain.
“In Spain, we were all with masks and here it’s the same,” Fernández said. “It was boring but not bad.”
Senior Courtney Dow said she is excited about the tough schedule and thinks it is a good opportunity for the team to come out and make a statement by competing with the best.
“Most of our tournaments are around 10 to 15 teams so it’s not too much different than normal, but it’s definitely a strong feel seeing all SEC teams,” Dow said. “It’ll be a good opportunity for us to beat some really good teams and hopefully improve our ranking.”
The team returns four seniors, one junior, one sophomore and two freshmen into the 2020-2021 season.
As competition kicks off on Monday, the men’s and women’s teams are starting their fall seasons on one of the country’s toughest courses which hosted the 2019 National Championship, according to the athletic department.
“This will be like playing our conference championship three times in a month,” Gaston said.