The Dale McNamara Fall Preview Monday through Wednesday at Tulsa Country Club will boast 11 of the top 12 teams in the nation as ranked by Golfweek Magazine.
Included will be top-ranked and defending NCAA champion USC, led by defending individual champion Annie Park. The only team missing from the top 10 is No. 3 UCLA, which has not started school.
Also in Tulsa will be No. 2 Alabama, No. 4 Duke, No. 5 Oklahoma, No. 6 Stanford, No. 7 Oklahoma State, No. 8 Arizona State, No. 9 Arizona, No. 10 Arkansas, No. 11, North Carolina, No. 12 Vanderbilt and unranked perennial top 25 contenders Georgia, Texas and Tulane. All of them are eager to get a first look at the renovated Tulsa Country Club prior to the 2014 NCAA Championships scheduled there May 20-23.
The University of Tulsa, host of both the fall preview and the 2014 NCAA Championship, would normally have fit right in with this august field. TU, however, is coming off a season in which it did not earn a berth in an NCAA regional, let alone the NCAA Championship. It was the first time in head coach Randy Keck's six seasons that had occurred. There are three regionals consisting of 24 teams, meaning Tulsa was outside the top 72 teams in the nation in 2013.
Such a thing would have been unthinkable during the program's long run of excellence under the tournament's namesake Dale McNamara, who led Tulsa to 21 national tournaments and four national titles in 26 seasons as head coach. McNamara retired in 2000 and her level of success has been hard to sustain.
The LPGA Tour was once populated by numerous Tulsa graduates. When Stacy Prammanasudh, a four-time All-American at TU from 1999-2002, retires at the end of the current LPGA season, there will be no TU alumni on tour for the first time since Nancy Lopez went pro after leading TU to the AIAW national championship in her sophomore year in 1977.
Keck is fully aware of the university's extraordinary history in women's golf and knows that it would be considered somewhere between poor form and a disaster for Tulsa not to make the field for the tournament it is hosting.
"Sure, it's extra pressure on the kids and on me," Keck said. "It would be the worst feeling in the world to host the national championship and you're not in it. That puts a bit of extra pressure on every one of us to work hard and to prepare. We have every intention of being there."
Tulsa will get a good idea of how daunting that challenge will be in the preview. Keck is optimistic that the return of senior Kayla Riede, who redshirted last year after hip surgery, combined with sophomore Antonia Von Wnuck, a native of Frankfurt, Germany, whom Keck says has an LPGA future, will give the Hurricane a good starting point.
Big things are also expected from West Texas transfer Franziska Voellinger, a native of Oberasbach, Germany, and eventually from true freshman Nadia Majidi from Union High School.
The No. 5 Sooners are led by Chirapat Jao-Javanil, the 2012 NCAA individual champion, as well as fellow seniors Anne-Catherine Tanquay, Emily Collins and Kaitlyn Rohrback. OU has posted 23 top-five finishes in 33 events during the career of the four seniors.
OSU has a new coach in Courtney Jones, who replaced new OSU men's coach Alan Bratton. Jones will depend on seniors Julie Yang and Jayde Panos.
Tulsa Country Club is in excellent condition according to both Keck and TCC head professional Jeff Combe. The course will play at 6,180 yards to a par of 70 for the preview.
"That's not long for these players, but the scores will be higher than you would expect," Keck said. "Tulsa Country Club is the hardest 6,000 yards in the country. It's just hard to shoot low out there. The rough is thick and the greens are such that it's hard to hit many shots close."
TCC recently underwent a massive renovation under the auspices of architect Rees Jones that included all-new green complexes, bunkers and some new tee boxes and angles of play.
Play begins at 8 a.m. Monday and is open to the public at no charge. Live scoring will be available on
www.tulsaworld.com/golfstat
Dale McNamara Fall Preview
At Tulsa Country Club
Monday - Wednesday
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