Bulldogs To Host Southern Intercollegiates Monday

The Georgia men’s golf team will return to action on Monday as it hosts the 36-hole Southern Intercollegiate Championships at Athens Country Club.

Play will begin with shotgun starts at 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. There is no cost for admission. Live scoring will be available on Golfstat.com.

Georgia will field two five-man lineups that will begin on Nos. 7 and 8. Georgia’s first lineup will consist of senior Zach Healy, junior Jack Larkin Jr., sophomores Trevor Phillips and Spencer Ralston, and freshman Davis Thompson. The Bulldogs’ second lineup will be manned by juniors Matthew Beringer and David Mackey, sophomore Will Chandler, and freshmen John Hilliard Catanzaro and Bo Sikes. Junior Tye Waller, who is recovering from an injury, will serve as the second squad’s honorary captain.

Ralston and Phillips have appeared in every event this year and lead the Bulldogs with scoring averages of 70.95 and 72.52, respectively. Thompson, who has missed only one tournament this season, is third at 72.78. Sikes will be making his collegiate debut.

“We’re really looking forward to Monday,” Georgia head coach Chris Haack said. “It’s a great team experience having all 11 of our players basically out there at the same time, kind of like one of our practices or qualifying rounds. The added benefit is that they’ll be under tournament conditions, so we’ll see how they respond. This is a chance to compete with each other and other teams on a course we’ve seen a lot. We’re getting close to crunch time with this team, so it’s another chance to see what we’ve got.”

Joining the Bulldogs will be Arkansas, Charleston Southern, Chattanooga, Florida State, Francis Marion, Gardner-Webb, High Point, Iowa, Kennesaw State, Lipscomb, Nicholls State, Savannah State, USC Upstate, Western Carolina, Wofford and Youngstown State.

The SICs were the brainchild of Georgia athletic director Herman Stegeman and Athens Country Club founder Lon Dudley in 1934. The first tournament was held in 1935 and ran annually through 1942. It resumed in 1946 and was held through 1965, then was relaunched in 1975 and ran through 1990. The current reboot took place in 2015. Past individual medalists include Wake Forest’s Arnold Palmer in 1950, Oklahoma State’s Bob Tway in 1979 and Centenary’s Hal Sutton in 1980. The medalist’s name is engraved on the Stegeman Memorial Golf Trophy and is on display at Athens Country Club.

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