THE FLATS – Georgia Tech’s golf team, ranked No. 17 in the Bushnell/Golfweek coaches poll, continues its 2024 fall schedule Monday and Tuesday at the Ben Hogan Collegiate Invitational. The XX annual event will be contested at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas. Tech is coming off an impressive victory just a week ago at the Olympia Fields/Fighting Illini Invitational, where the Yellow Jackets bested No. 2 Arizona State by a stroke and a 15-team field that included 11 other top-25 teams. Redshirt junior Benjamin Reuter (Naarden, The Netherlands) took second place individually.
The 15-team field includes four teams – Tech (No. 17 in the current Bushnell/Golfweek Coaches Poll), Auburn (1), Vanderbilt (4) and North Carolina (No. 16) – who advanced to match play at the NCAA Championship last May, and 12 teams that competed in stroke play. Also competing are eight other programs ranked among the top-25 in the pre-season Bushnell/Golfweek Coaches Poll. Teams will play 36 holes Monday with a shotgun start beginning at 9 a.m. Eastern time, with the final round starting at 9 a.m. Tuesday.
Head coach Bruce Heppler, in his 30th year at the helm of the Tech program, has returned four golfers who played significant roles in getting the Yellow Jackets to the semifinals of the NCAA Championship for the second straight year in 2024, including reigning NCAA Champion Hiroshi Tai (Singapore), who became Tech’s fourth national collegiate champion with his one-shot victory last May in Carlsbad, Calif.
TECH LINEUP – Tai, who has won three collegiate tournaments in two years, is on the Fall Watch List for the Fred Haskins Award and has been listed as a pre-season All-American by Golfweek magazine and Golf Channel, leads the five-man contingent for the Yellow Jackets this weekend. The junior from Singapore is currently No. 29 in the World Amateur Golf Ranking and has finished 12th and sixth in Tech’s two events thus far.
Tai will be joined in the lineup this weekend by Reuter, who has 17 collegiate events and two top-10 finishes under his belt, freshman Albert Hansson (Fiskebäckskil, Sweden), who has a sub-71 stroke average in six rounds, and sophomores Kale Fontenot (Lafayette, La.) and Carson Kim (Yorba Linda, Calif.), who have played in 14 collegiate events each, and All five players finished 37th or higher out of 78 players in the Olympia Fields event. Tai (T-25) and Kim (T-73) are the only Yellow Jackets who competed in last year’s Ben Hogan event.
TOURNAMENT INFORMATION – The Yellow Jackets are competing in the Ben Hogan Collegiate Invitational for the third time, having finished 12th in 2023 and eighth in 2023 in its previous two appearances. Christo Lamprecht earned a share of the individual title last fall, while Hiroshi Tai posted the top finish of three returning Jackets with a tie for 25th.
Hosted by TCU, the tournament is contested at Colonial Country Club, which annually hosts an event on the PGA Tour. It plays to a par of 70 and measures 7,289 yards. The Ben Hogan event will include 11 teams that competed in the 2024 NCAA Championship, including four that advanced to match play (Tech, Auburn, North Carolina and Vanderbilt). Twelve teams in the field are among the current Bushnell/Golfweek Coaches top-25.
The complete field includes Arizona (13), Arizona State (2), Auburn (1), Georgia (21), Georgia Tech (17), North Carolina (16), Oklahoma (8), Oregon, Stanford (22), TCU, Texas (11), Texas A&M (19), Texas Tech (14), Vanderbilt (4) and Wake Forest. Copyright (C) 2024, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
