Huskers Qualify for NCAA Championships at Purdue

Lincoln -- For only the second time in school history, the Nebraska women's golf team is headed to the NCAA Championships, May 20-23, in West Lafayette, Ind.

The NCAA Championships will be contested at the par-72, 6,300-yard Birck Boilermaker Golf Course. The Huskers are already familiar with the course, as the team competed at the Lady Boilermaker Invite in April at the same course. The championship format is a four-day 72-hole meet with tee times and seedings to be announced later this week.

The Huskers qualified for the NCAA meet with a fifth-place finish at the NCAA Central Regional held May 9-10 at Firethorn Golf Club.

NU came into the regional seeded 19th, but climbed the leaderboard on the second day to finish among the top eight teams at the regional and advance to the NCAA Championships.

The Huskers took home 19th out of 24 teams at the 2000 NCAA Championships in Sunriver, Ore., in their only other NCAA appearance. NU senior Sarah Sasse finished second on the team as a sophomore at the meet after firing a four-round score of 304. Sasse also competed as an individual at the 2001 NCAA Championships, and is the only Husker in school history to compete at more than one NCAA Championship.

Nebraska head coach Robin Krapfl is looking forward to next week's competition.

"I think it was a tremendous accomplishment for us to keep fighting at the regional and be able to compete at the National Championship," Krapfl said. "Not a lot of student-athletes get to compete for a national title during their careers. We are going to go out there with an attitude of playing loose and seeing what happens."

The Nebraska lineup will be Sasse, junior Stephanie Schaefer and sophomores Merynn Ito, Stephanie Ruiz and Beth Anne Cherry.