Instant Peay Play: Spring Championships begins this week for APSU Govs

Clarksville, TN – With another academic school year quickly coming to an end for Austin Peay State University, it marks the beginning of several conference championship weeks for its eight spring sports teams.

Kicking things off this week will be the women’s golf and beach volleyball teams, with the women’s golf team opening play at Ohio Valley Conference Women’s Golf Championship, April 15th-17th, and the beach volleyball team making its first ever post-season trip to the Atlantic Sun Conference Championships, April 18th-20th.

The women’s golf team will send a very experienced team to this week’s 54-hole OVC Championship, at the 6,043-yard, par-72 Schoolmaster Course of the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail at the Shoals in Muscle Shoals, AL, with the squad being comprised of three seniors, a junior and a freshman.

Senior twin sisters Taylor and Ashton Goodley will be making their fourth trip to the OVC Championships, both looking to add to careers that have included All-OVC honors, while fellow senior Reagan Greene and junior Meghann Stamps hope to improve on their two Top-10 finishes from a year ago.

Rounding out the Govs squad will be freshman Taylor Dedmen, who will be slotted as the Govs No. 1 player in the tournament and leads the team this spring with a 76 strokes per round average.

The Govs will be joined in the OVC Women’s Golf Championship by two-time defending champion Murray State, Belmont, Eastern Illinois, Eastern Kentucky, Jacksonville State, Morehead State, Tennessee State and Tennessee Tech.

Austin Peay is scheduled to begin play at 8:50am, on April 15th, paired with Morehead State and Belmont in the opening round.

For beach volleyball (15-13, 4-4 ASUN), after playing its first two seasons without a conference affiliation, they joined the Atlantic Sun Conference and earned a spot in the conference’s championship tournament in DeLand, FL, after posting its first winning season in the program’s three-year history.

The Govs, who will be joined in the tournament by Stetson, North Florida, Coastal Carolina, Florida Gulf Coast and North Alabama, enter the double-elimination tournament as the fifth-seed and will open play versus No. four-seed Coastal Carolina (19-9, 8-0 ASUN), at 7:30pm, on April 18th.

The Govs were led this season by the pairing of junior Jenna Panning and sophomore Haley Turner, who finished the regular season with a 14-7 record together — including a 9-3 mark as the No. 1 pairing — after opened ASUN play with four straight victories at the No. 2 and 3 pairings.

They also paced the team in individual victories, as both finished with 18-10 individual records.

Fifth-year transfer Ciera Koons and sophomore Brooke Moore also enter the ASUN Championship playing well having won 11 of their last 15 matches after taking over the No. 2 pairing in the final week of the season.