After recording her first collegiate victory at the Clemson Invitational last week, Julie McCarthy has kept up her fine run of form and leads the individual standings at the SEC Championship at Greystone Golf & Country Club in Alabama after round one.
McCarthy, a sophomore at at Auburn, fired an opening round 68 which included 5 birdies and she did all the hard work on the back nine, needing just 32 strokes as she carded birdies on 11, 13, 14 and 18.
Ranked No. 4 in the country, McCarthy has now shot par or better in nine of her 13 rounds this spring and she leads the tournament by one stroke from Julia Johnson (Ole Miss) and Marta Perez SanMartin (Florida) with her Auburn Tigers team also tied for first place in the team standings with Florida on 284.
“It’s brilliant for us,” McCarthy said. “We had always wanted to start strong. We had the same idea at Clemson last week because we knew the weather was coming in, and so I think it’s just a great start and we’ll try to keep it going.”
“Obviously a good start is really important,” added Auburn head coach Melissa Luellen. “You don’t want to be clawing your way back into the tournament. I feel like we kind of got the nerves out of the way. Now we’ve got two more days to try to win the stroke play portion and put ourselves in a good seeding for match play.”
Beginning at 9:40 a.m. CT, the Tigers will tee off alongside Florida and South Carolina on Thursday in the second day of stroke play. Live scoring can be found on Golfstat.com.
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