Sept. 12, 2015
SAN DIEGO -- The defending Mountain West champion San Diego State men's golf team opens it 2015-16 season in earnest next week when it competes in the Saint Mary's Invitational, Sept. 14-16, at Pebble Beach, Calif. The Aztecs will be making their first-ever appearance in the three-day 54-hole tournament, which will be contested on the prestigious par-71, 6,868-yard Poppy Hills Golf Course.
SDSU will tee off Monday on hole No. 1 for the opening round at 8:20 a.m. PT with host Saint Mary's and Texas State, while pairings for the second and third rounds will be determined by team standings. A live scoring link courtesy of BirdieFire will be available for all three rounds on GoAztecs.com.
In addition to the aforementioned squads, the 32nd-ranked Aztecs will square off against three Pac-12 schools in Arizona, Oregon State and Washington State, along with MW rival Fresno State. The 15-team field also includes six additional West Coast Conference schools in Brigham Young, Gonzaga, Loyola Marymount, Pacific, San Diego, San Francisco and Santa Clara, while UC Davis rounds out the list of participants.
With intense competition up and down the 2015-16 SDSU roster, along with the graduation of All-American Xander Schauffele, 13th-year head coach Ryan Donovan has shuffled the deck for the season opener to include just two starters from last season's NCAA Championship lineup, seniors Ryann Ree (Redondo Beach, Calif.) and Riccardo Michelini (Carpi, Italy), who will join junior Brian Song (Beverly Hills, Calif.) and sophomores Gunn Yang (Pyeongchang, South Korea) and Blake Abercrombie (Rocklin, Calif.).
Ree made an immediate impact for the Scarlet and Black, earning all-MW honors after joining the squad at the semester break last January. The Oregon transfer finished second on the team last year with a 72.13 scoring average in 31 rounds and was SDSU's top individual finisher at the NCAA Championships. Meanwhile, Michelini averaged 73.23 strokes per round in 10 tournaments and logged three top-20 placements, including a fourth-place showing at the Alister MacKenzie Invitational.
But perhaps the most intriguing story entering the new season is the return of Yang, the 2014 U.S. Amateur champion who took a year off from collegiate competition to play in numerous high-level events, including the Masters, U.S. Open and British Open. An alumnus of Torrey Pines High, Yang was the highest finishing amateur last November at the Mazda NSW Open in Australia, where he placed fourth overall, followed by a third-place tie at the New Year's Invitational in St. Petersburg, Fla. Subsequently, Yang's best finish of the spring occurred at the Crowne Invitational at Colonial in Fort Worth, Texas, where he tied for 65th with a combined 2-over 282. He also advanced to match play for the second year in a row at the U.S. Amateur in August at Olympia Fields, Ill., but was eliminated in the first round.
Elsewhere, Song ranked third on the Aztecs with a 72.90 scoring average in seven tournaments a year ago, posting a pair of top-20 finishes, including a 14th-place tie at SDSU's own Barona Collegiate Cup. He posted a career-best 67 in the opening round of the aforementioned event, propelling the Scarlet and Black to the team title. Meanwhile, Abercrombie will be making his first varsity start for the Aztecs after competing as an unattached golfer in three tournaments as a freshman.
This season marks the 10th installment of the Saint Mary's Invitational, which returns to Poppy Hills after a five-year run at Bayonet and Black Horse Golf Courses in Seaside, Calif. The University of San Diego swept both the team and individual titles in 2014, with the Toreros' Mathias Dahl capturing medalist honors after shooting a 7-under 209.
Poppy Hills opened in 1986 and has since co-hosted the PGA Tour's AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am from 1991-2009, as well as the Spalding Pebble Beach Invitational (1989, 1990, 1992, 1993) and the 1991 NCAA Men's Golf Championships. Designed by Robert Trent Jones, Jr., Poppy Hills became the first course to be owned and operated by a golf association in the United States when the Northern California Golf Association built the club to serve as its headquarters and tournament home.
With a focus on water conservation, Poppy Hills underwent an extensive renovation in 2013 by improving irrigation and drainage. The Jones design firm reinvented the course architecturally, restoring each hole to its natural elevation along the forest floor, softening doglegs and contours, rebuilding all 18 greens with bentgrass, eliminating rough and introducing native waste areas that reduce irrigated turf by nearly 25 percent. The refurbished Poppy Hills opened in April 2014 and currently plays host the Champions Tour's Nature Valley Open.
Following the Saint Mary's Invite, San Diego State will return to the fairways for the William H. Tucker Intercollegiate, Sept. 25-26, in Albuquerque, N.M.