Oct. 31, 2015
SAN DIEGO - The San Diego State men's golf team wraps up its fall schedule next week when it competes in the Gifford Collegiate, Nov. 2-4, at OMNI La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad, Calif. The three-day 54-hole tournament gets underway Monday on the par-71, 6,996-yard Legends Course, with UCLA serving as host school. A live scoring link courtesy of Golfstat will be available on GoAztecs.com.
Along with the No. 27 Aztecs, the elite field features eight additional teams ranked among the top 50 in the latest Golfweek/Sagarin index, including Stanford (5), South Florida (22), Texas A&M (28), UCLA (29), Oregon (31), Tennessee (44), Arkansas (46) and Washington (47). SDSU will also get an early look at Mountain West rival San José State, while Colorado, Harvard, Marquette, Northwestern and Wisconsin round out the list of participating teams.
SDSU head coach Ryan Donovan has shuffled his starting lineup for the third time this fall. Taking center stage for the Scarlet and Black at La Costa next week are seniors Riccardo Michelini (Carpi, Italy) and Ryann Ree (Redondo Beach, Calif.), sophomores Gunn Yang (Pyeongchang, South Korea) and Blake Abercrombie (Rocklin, Calif.), along with junior Nahum Mendoza III (San Diego, Calif.), who is slated to make his first varsity appearance of the 2015-16 campaign.
The Aztecs are coming off a solid fourth-place finish in their last outing at the Alister MacKenzie Invitational in northern California on Oct. 13, tying for the third-lowest 54-hole score in program history with a 31-under par 821. Individually, SDSU was led by Ree (-14) and Michelini (-13), who finished fifth and sixth, respectively, after each completed the tournament with the lowest three-round scores of their collegiate careers.
Michelini, who occupies the 68th spot nationally in the latest Golfweek individual ratings, leads the Aztecs with a 70.22 scoring average, while Ree (71.33) tops the squad with four rounds in the 60s. In addition, Yang ranks third on the team with 72.22 strokes per round, while Abercrombie (72.33) recently turned in a second-place effort as an unattached golfer at the CSUSM Fall Classic where Mendoza also competed, tying for 10th.
The Aztecs will be making their first-ever appearance at the Gifford Collegiate, which is in its 11th incarnation. With the exception of a one-year stop at Newport Beach's Pelican Hill Golf Club in 2013, the tournament has been contested at CordeValle Resort in San Martin on nine previous occasions.
The Gifford Collegiate has also featured a six-count-five format seven times, including last year when host UCLA took home the team title with a 15-under 1050, three strokes ahead of runner-up USC. Dylan Wu of Northwestern, who captured medalist honors last season with a 9-under 204, returns to defend is individual title, while UCLA's Lorens Chan and Jake Knapp, who finished second and third, respectively, are also back in the mix.
Following next week's tournament, San Diego State will have three-and-a-half months off before opening their spring schedule at The Prestige at PGA West, Feb.15-17, 2016, in La Quinta, Calif.