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Austin Peay State University Men’s Golf heads to Muscle Shoals for OVC Tournament

Austin Peay Sports Information

APSU Men's GolfClarksville, TN – After a spring season featuring a win and a brand of consistent golf befitting the league’s best squads, Austin Peay State University men’s golf hopes to be peaking at the right time as the Govs get set to begin the 2018 Ohio Valley Conference Men’s Golf Championships, Monday, at the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail at the Shoals in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

Austin Peay Men's Golf beings OVC Tournament play, Monday. (APSU Sports Information)
Austin Peay Men’s Golf beings OVC Tournament play, Monday. (APSU Sports Information)

The OVC Championships will be played on the Fighting Joe course at the Shoals, a par-72, 7,258-yard behemoth that has hosted this event five years in a row now and six times overall.

Eleven league universities will be present—in addition to the Govs and defending champion Jacksonville State, student-athletes from Belmont, Eastern Illinois, Eastern Kentucky, Morehead State, Murray State, SIU Edwardsville, Tennessee State, Tennessee Tech and UT Martin will compete for a title.

Austin Peay will tee off alongside Morehead State and Belmont at approximately 8:50am, Monday.

Few teams in this field will trot out a lineup more youthful than the Governors, who will have two freshmen and a trio of sophomores represent Austin Peay this week. Of those five, only Alex Vegh and Austin Lancaster have experience on this course; they were part of the lineup last year at the 2017 OVC Championships, wherein the Govs finished sixth as a team, with Vegh picking up a top-20 finish in his first OVC appearance.

Vegh, Lancaster and sophomore Michael Busse constitute the sophomores in Austin Peay’s lineup for the week. Vegh is 13th in the OVC in stroke average (73.5), two spots ahead of Lancaster (73.6); between them, they have seven rounds in the 60s and 19 under par this season. Busse enjoyed a three-tournament stretch that saw him, like Lancaster, finish in the top-10 at the Invitational at Savannah Harbor, the Fort Lauderdale Intercollegiate—which the Govs won—and the Bobby Nichols Intercollegiate, which he hopes to replicate in his OVC Championship debut.

Chase Korte and Garrett Whitfield will make their OVC debuts as freshmen this week. For Whitfield, it’s the culmination of a resurgent spring that saw him recapture the No. 5 spot in the lineup thanks to back-to-back top-20 finishes at the Bubba Barnett Intercollegiate (20th) and Wofford Intercollegiate (11th), shooting a two-under 214 in Spartanburg two weeks ago.

But in terms of week-in, week-out dominance, Korte has been in a class by himself for much of the season. His runner-up honor two weeks ago at Wofford was his team-best fourth top-10 finish, while his overall stroke average of 72.8 doesn’t just lead the Govs, it ranks fourth in the league at a full stroke better than Jacksonville State’s Jesus Montenegro, his chief competition for OVC Freshman of the Year honors. His .739 winning percentage is a team-best and he was Austin Peay’s top finisher six times in 11 events.

Live scoring will be available at OVCSports.com’s Tournament Central page, with the top-five finishers slated to earn all-tournament honors. LetsGoPeay.com will have a complete recap each day, while Austin Peay’s men’s golf twitter (@AustinPeayMGO) will have updates throughout the round.

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