Rice Ready To Go At NAIA National Championships

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KANSAS CITY, Mo. - The 16th Annual NAIA Women's Golf National Championships are set to tee off Tuesday at Meadowbrook Golf Course in Rapid City, S.D. Mobile's Maegan Rice is competing as an individual at the event and will tee off in the first round Tuesday at 8:10 am (MDT) on hole No. 1, and then tee off Wednesday at 2:30 pm (MDT) on hole No. 10. The event will be four rounds of stroke play.

The 129-player championships field is comprised of 14 automatic qualifying teams from NAIA affiliated conferences/unaffiliated groupings and 10 at-large selections, which are determined using the final Top 25 rating released on May 7. South Dakota School of Mines & Technology qualifies as the host institution.

Among the 14 teams bound for Rapid City, four have previously won a national team title. Oklahoma City has five championships to their credit, all in the last five years. British Columbia took home top honors in 2001 and 2004. Southern Nazarene (Okla.) has won the event twice, taking home the title in 1999 and 2002. In 2003, Northwood (Fla.) won its first women’s golf crown.

Nineteen of this year’s 25 qualifying teams played in the event a year ago, led by defending titlist Oklahoma City. The Stars carded a 302-311-302-313—1228 en route to the win. Second-place went to Bethel (Ind.) with a 303-330-306-322—1261 outing in Rapid City.

A trio of players earned a spot in the field through automatic qualification: Wolverine-Hoosier Athletic Conference medalist Caitlin Duval of Davenport (Mich.), Lewis-Clark State’s (Idaho) Courtney Shrout won the Frontier Conference and Rice was the medalist at the Unaffiliated Group #4 - Gulf Coast/Southern States/TranSouth tournament. A pair of Cumberlands (Ky.) players, McKinzie Price and Emma Cutmore, along with Jada Bennington of William Woods (Mo.), were at-large selections.

In the event’s 16-year history, 12 different programs have produced the individual medalist, led by Oklahoma City with three. Bethel’s Shanna Page became the second Bethel individual to win the title and join the Stars as the only other program with multiple individual medalists.