BATON ROUGE – The LSU women’s golf team gets the fall portion of its 2025-26 wraparound season underway on Monday at the Cougar Classic in Charleston, South Carolina.
The Tigers were ranked seventh in the opening Mizuno/Women’s Golf Coaches Association Coaches poll which was announced on Friday.
For Coach Garrett Runion, he begins his eighth season as the head coach of the Tigers, having taken the team to a school record five consecutive NCAA Championship appearances.
The Cougar Classic has become a traditional starting point for LSU seasons at the historic Yeamans Hall Club, which will play to a par of 71. The course was built in 1925 by Seth Raynor and in the late 1990 was renovated by Tom Doak to reestablish some of the green contours which had been lost over the years.
Besides LSU and the host College of Charleston, the field includes Auburn, Boston College, Clemson, Florida, Furman, Georgetown, Georgia, Maryland, Miami, NC State, Ole Miss, Penn State, Tennessee, UCF, Virginia Tech and Yale.
“Every year I get excited to start the season, but this year I am a little extra excited with the team and schedule we have,” said Coach Runion. “We have three seniors, three sophomores and three freshmen on the roster with four of the nine players being new to LSU. Every one of them has a lot of experience has accomplished a lot which gives us a tremendous amount of depth this year.”
LSU for the opening event will go with fifth year senior Elsa Svensson, UCLA transfer sophomore Francesca Fiorellini, senior Taylor Riley, sophomore Josefin Widal and senior Edit Hertzman.
“We wasted no time getting started with our first tournament of the year starting just two weeks after the first day of school,” said Coach Runion. “Practices have been very competitive, and we are seeing some really good scores the last two weeks while we’ve played. It wouldn’t surprise me if we saw a couple different line ups this fall, with the amount of good players we have.
“Francesca Fiorellini transferring in has been a big addition to our sophomore class with Rocio Tejedo and Josefin Widal who will be pushing the seniors for playing time. Francesca’s game is very impressive, but her character, personality and demeanor may be better as she seems to be fitting in with the team very nicely and contributing very positively.”
LSU’s three freshman all have strong credentials coming to college with Ryleigh Knaub of Florida, Perla Sol Sigurbrandsdottir of Iceland and Lucia Iraola of Spain.
“Our three freshmen have started to settle in, see the expectations set here and the level of work it takes and they have not flinched,” said Coach Runion. “It will be exciting to see how this fall turns out, it always seems like a sprint with four tournaments in six weeks, almost touching all four corners of the US playing against some of the best teams in the country.”
The Tigers follow up the Cougar Classic with a new event for LSU in the Golfweek Red Sky Classic in Wolcott, Colorado (Sept. 22-24) before October events at famed Medinah Country Club for the Illini Women’s Invitational (Oct. 6-8) and the Stanford Intercollegiate (Oct. 17-19).
The goal at the end of the spring portion of the season is the NCAA Championships which will for the third straight year will be held in Carlsbad, California at the OMNI La Costa Result and Spa.
The 36-hole shotgun start begins at 7:30 a.m. and live scoring for the Cougar Classic can be found at Scoreboard.clippd.com.
