April 22, 2006

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BIG EAST Championship
Monday-Tuesday, April 24-25, 2006
8:50 a.m. (ET) Monday/Time TBD Tuesday
Lake Jovita Golf & Country Club/South Course Dade City, Fla.
Par 72/7,152 yards

Irish Prepare To Defend Back-To-Back Conference Titles Fresh off its best outing of the season (a third-place finish at the Boilermaker Invitational), Notre Dame heads to Dade City, Fla., Monday and Tuesday for the BIG EAST Conference Championship. The event will be hosted by South Florida on the South Course (par 72/7,152 yards) at the Lake Jovita Golf & Country Club, after five of the prior six conference tournaments were held at Notre Dame's Warren Golf Course.

The Irish are the two-time defending BIG EAST champions and rank second in conference history with five titles to their credit. Notre Dame is seeking to become only the second school ever to win three consecutive BIG EAST crowns on two separate occasions - the Irish previously won three in a row from 1995-97. The winner of this week's event will earn an automatic berth into the 2006 NCAA Championships, which begin May 18-20 with regional play.

Notre Dame continues to enjoy one of its most successful seasons ever in 2005-06, currently posting a school-record 294.63 stroke average with six top-six finishes and six wins over Golfweek Top 25 opponents. The Irish also are poised to have three players finish with sub-74 stroke averages for the first time in the 77-year history of the program.

Quoting Coach Kubinski ...
"We're looking forward to this week's BIG EAST Championship at Lake Jovita. With several new BIG EAST teams now in the fold, it should make for a very competitive event. While we've only teed it up with Louisville due to the national flavor of our schedule, I've noticed several good showings by conference teams at various events. This year's championship will certainly force the winning team to play at a high level for 54 holes.

"I really like the fact that Cole (Isban) has found his stride. Right now, when the putts aren't falling, he's in the 74 range on a tough day and can go very low when the putts are dropping. His 67 in Augusta was an example of this. He's swinging well, and his short game, which was a little rusty a while back, has come alive. He's one of the best anywhere when he gets it going.

"Josh (Sandman) has been very, very impressive both in Augusta and at Purdue. He keeps giving himself great chances for birdie on each hole. He is very strong in so many areas. Most importantly, he's developed in so many areas both on and off the course this year. He's made himself quite a factor on this team and should help provide a balanced attack for us in Tampa.

"Both Mark (Baldwin) and Scott (Gustafson) have played inconsistently of late but watching them in practice gives me great confidence that each will rise to the occasion this week. I've always heard senior leadership is important, and when I watch both Mark and Scott compete, I realize why. They've been through the battles before and aren't shaken when faced with adverse circumstances. The championship climate will be one they're ready for.

"Tommy (Balderston) battled a neck/shoulder injury through the fall and took a while to get going this spring. While he hasn't played an official event this season, he may have the most tournament experience of any of our players when combining junior and college golf. He's a two-time all-BIG EAST selection, so he certainly has experience in the championship environment. He's playing so solidly right now and driving the ball very well. I feel strongly that Tommy can give us that round or two from the No. 5 position, and with his talent level, it's as if we have a capable top-of-the-lineup type player at No. 5.

"We'll need to build on our play at Purdue and be ready to battle. Golf is a game of breaks. It's such a mental test and not much separates the champs from the runners-up. The formula is simple, though. We must take advantage of the good breaks and easier holes and not allow bad breaks or the tougher holes to take us out of our rhythm. We certainly have enough talent and a great will to compete. We'll be ready. We're excited for this opportunity and will represent Notre Dame with everything we have."

Dates and Times
Teams will play two rounds (36 holes) on Monday. As the No. 2 seed, Notre Dame will be paired with No. 1 Louisville and third-seeded Marquette for the first day of the BIG EAST Championship, starting with the opening round at 8:50 a.m. (ET) from the first tee at Lake Jovita's South Course. Competitors will tee off in 10-minute intervals, beginning with the No. 5 golfer in the lineup and working in reverse order, ending up with the No. 1 golfer at 9:30 a.m. (ET). The start of the second round will follow the same format beginning at 1:50 p.m. (ET) Monday, also from the No. 1 tee at the South Course.

Teams will then return to the course Tuesday for the final round with preassigned tee times based upon the 36-hole standings. The top six teams will go off at 8:50 a.m. (ET), with Nos. 1-3 teeing from No. 1 and Nos. 4-6 starting at No. 10. The seventh-12th place squads will begin the final round at 8 a.m. (ET), with Nos. 7-9 going from No. 10 and Nos. 10-12 beginning at the first tee.

Following The Irish
Live scoring (every nine holes) for the BIG EAST Championship will be available through the Golfstat web site (www.golfstat.com). Complete results following each day's action also will be posted on the official Notre Dame athletics web site (www.und.com).

In addition, in-progress updates will be available on the Notre Dame Sports Hotline (574-631-3000) - callers should select option #9, then press #2. Assistant sports information director Chris Masters will be on location with the Irish in Florida and will provide live reports from the course at the top of every hour during both days of competition at the BIG EAST Championship.

The Tournament Format
A total of 12 five-man teams (60 participants) will be participating in the BIG EAST Championship. Conventional collegiate golf team scoring rules will apply, with the lowest four scores in the five-man lineup for each round counting toward the team total. The team with the lowest 54-hole score will be declared champion and will receive the BIG EAST's automatic bid to the 2006 NCAA Championship.

In case of team ties, a sudden-death playoff will be utilized, with the top four individual scores on each hole combined for the team total. There will be no playoff to determine an individual champion.

The Teams
The 12-team field for this year's BIG EAST Championship is as follows (in order of seeding): Louisville, Notre Dame, Marquette, South Florida, St. John's, Villanova, Georgetown, DePaul, Rutgers, Connecticut, Cincinnati and Seton Hall. With the introduction of five new teams to the conference this year (Louisville, Marquette, USF, DePaul and Cincinnati), this will be the largest field ever for a BIG EAST men's golf tournament, with the previous high-water mark being a nine-team competition from 1995-2000 (the tournament shifted from a fall to spring event in the 1999-00 academic year). The past four years all have seen the BIG EAST Championship played with a six-team field.

According to the latest ratings in the Golfweek/Sagarin Performance Index (as of April 17), Louisville (No. 50) and Notre Dame (No. 54) stand as the top two teams in the BIG EAST field. Marquette is third at No. 87 and is the only other conference school among the top 100 in the current Golfweek rankings.

In addition, the newest Golfstat rankings were unveiled April 18 and there also are three of this year's BIG EAST participants appearing in that service's Top 100. No. 48 Louisville and No. 53 Notre Dame set the pace, followed by No. 94 Marquette.

Meanwhile, in the most recent GCAA/Bridgestone Top 25 poll (released April 13), three teams in this year's field are receiving votes. Louisville leads the way with 24 votes (good for 34th if the poll were extended), while Marquette is picking up five votes (50th) and Notre Dame is earning three votes (tie-52nd).

Head-To-Head
Entering the BIG EAST Championship, Notre Dame has faced just one of the other 11 teams in the field. The Irish competed against Louisville at the Boilermaker Invitational on April 8-9 in West Lafayette, Ind., eventually defeating the Cardinals head-to-head by five strokes (900-905), with the teams finishing third and fourth, respectively, in the final tournament standings.

The Course
After a wildly successful run of five tournaments in six years at Notre Dame's Warren Golf Course, the BIG EAST Championship heads south to Dade City, Fla., (located outside Tampa), and the Lake Jovita Golf & Country Club. Both the men's and women's conference tournaments will be played concurrently at the facility, with the women competing on the North Course and the men battling on the South Course (par 72/7,152 yards).

Opening in 2000 and co-designed by PGA Tour veteran (and 2006 U.S. Ryder Cup captain) Tom Lehman and noted golf course achitect Kurt Sandness, Lake Jovita is like no other Florida layout. Its features include rolling hills, undulating valleys, and ancient hardwood forests dotted with freshwater lakes. The landscape and elevation changes here are far more typical of North Carolina than they are of Florida. In fact, the South Course features the longest natural drop of any golf course in the state - 94 feet from tee to green on the par-5, 11th hole.

In 2000, Golf Digest ranked the South Course among the nation's 10 best new upscale courses, and recently awarded the design No. 22 on its list of the state's best courses, public or private. The generous fairways, velvet-like greens, and immaculate course conditions will provide a stern test for each player in this year's BIG EAST Championship field.

Notre Dame At The BIG EAST Championship
Notre Dame has participated in each of the past 10 BIG EAST Championships and finished among the top three nine times since joining the conference prior to the 1995-96 academic year. To date, the Irish have won five titles (1995, 1996, 1997, 2004, 2005), which puts them second in league history behind the nine crowns won by St. John's from 1979-89. George Thomas served as the head coach for Notre Dame's first three BIG EAST victories, while John Jasinski guided the Irish to the 2004 title and current head coach Jim Kubinski was at the helm when Notre Dame won last year's event.

In addition to their five championships, the Irish have finished as tournament runner-up three times (1998 - tie with St. John's, 2002, 2003) and took third place honors in 2000.

Notre Dame golfers also have won medalist honors four times, tying Virginia Tech for the third-highest total in conference history behind St. John's (seven) and Providence (six). The most recent Irish individual champion was crowned in 2005 when current senior tri-captain Mark Baldwin won the weather-shortened BIG EAST Championship with a five-over par 75. Other Notre Dame golfers who were medalists at the conference tournament include: Bill Moore (1995), Todd Vernon (1997) and Steve Ratay (2001 - three-way tie with Brian Krusoe of Virginia Tech and Andrew Svoboda of St. John's).

Potent Notables On The Irish At The BIG EAST Championship
Notre Dame joins Virginia Tech and St. John's as the only three schools in the 25-year history of the BIG EAST Championship to win three consecutive titles. The Irish recorded their hat trick from 1995-97, Virginia Tech did so from 2001-03 and St. John's actually posted a pair of "four-peats" from 1981-84 and 1986-89.

Notre Dame's 32-stroke win in 1997 is the second-largest margin of victory in BIG EAST Championship history. St. John's finished 34 shots ahead of the field to win the 1988 conference title.

Of the five players who will represent Notre Dame at this year's BIG EAST Championship, four have earned all-conference citations and three of them have done so twice. Senior tri-captain Mark Baldwin took the honors in 2003 and 2005 (medalist), senior Tommy Balderston picked up the award in 2003 and 2004, junior Cole Isban was tapped in each of his first two seasons with the Irish (2004 and 2005), and senior tri-captain Scott Gustafson garnered his all-BIG EAST plaque in 2003.

Notre Dame will start a freshman at the BIG EAST Championship for the fifth consecutive year when rookie Josh Sandman steps to the No. 1 tee on Monday morning. In three of the previous four years, an Irish freshman has gone on to earn all-conference recognition (Ryan Marshall in 2002; Tommy Balderston, Mark Baldwin and Scott Gustafson in 2003; and Cole Isban in 2004). Last year, Mike King was the new kid on the block for Notre Dame, just missing an all-BIG EAST citation of his own with a tie for ninth place at 10-over par 80 (top seven players in the field are awarded all-conference status).

The second-round leader at the BIG EAST Championship has not won the conference title since 2002, when Virginia Tech protected its lead on the final day and defeated Notre Dame by 17 shots. In 2003, the Irish had a four-stroke edge on the Hokies going into the third round, but ended up falling by two shots. Then, in 2004, Notre Dame returned the favor, erasing Tech's five-stroke advantage with a final-round charge to win by six.

Although it's just six years old, the Warren Golf Course at Notre Dame already has played host to five BIG EAST Championships, second only to the TPC at Avenel (Potomac, Md.), which was the site of 11 conference tournaments, including 10 in a row from 1987-96.

Tourney Rewind: 2005 BIG EAST Championship
Notre Dame claimed its second consecutive BIG EAST Conference Championship (and fifth overall) on April 24, 2005, when the Irish were declared the tournament champions after a rare April snowstorm dropped two inches of snow on Notre Dame's Warren Golf Course, resulting in the cancellation of the final two rounds.

The Irish wound up defending their BIG EAST title by five shots over Georgetown, rallying from as many as seven shots down at the turn to card a 31-over par 311 in the first (and only) round that was played in gusty winds with occasional snow showers. The Hoyas finished second at 316 (+36), posting their best conference finish since winning the crown in 1998. Rutgers (318, +38) came in third for its highest result since a similar third-place showing in 2001.

Mark Baldwin wound up as the tournament medalist with a five-over par 75 in the opening round, becoming the fourth Notre Dame golfer ever to win the BIG EAST individual title. It also was the second medalist citation of Baldwin's career - he took top honors in a home dual match with No. 11 TCU back on April 9, 2005, after carding a three-under par 137 that included a course and school-record 63 in the first round.

Baldwin also was one of three Irish players to earn a spot on the all-BIG EAST team, having made the squad for the second time in his career after an initial appearance in 2003. Eric Deutsch shot a seven-over par 77 to tie for third place, the best finish of his career, and found his way back on the all-BIG EAST team for the second consecutive year. Likewise, Cole Isban was an all-league pick for the second year in a row after tying for seventh place at nine-over par 79.

Mike King turned his third top-10 finish of the '04-05 season, tying for ninth place at 10-over par 80. Meanwhile, Scott Gustafson ended up in a 21st-place tie at 14-over par 84.

The Ranking File
One of the ways Notre Dame has been able to inject itself into the conversation as one of the nation's upper-echelon programs has been its play against some of the other elite teams in the country. This season, the Irish have defeated six Top 25 opponents (according to Golfweek), including three in the past two tournaments alone. What's more, the Irish have ousted 11 ranked teams since head coach Jim Kubinski arrived on the Notre Dame campus in January 2005.

In 2005-06 alone, the Irish have dispatched No. 3 Florida (Shoal Creek Intercollegiate), No. 12 Tennessee (Administaff Augusta State Invitational), No. 16 Texas (The Prestige at PGA WEST), No. 16 Minnesota (Boilermaker Invitational), No. 17 Alabama (Shoal Creek) and No. 23 Northwestern (Boilermaker). All rankings are taken from the Golfweek index at the start of the tournament.

Measuring Stick
A good indication of the progress Notre Dame has made in the short time Jim Kubinski has been head coach can be found in the team's stroke average. Currently at 294.63, it would shatter the old school record by nearly four shots (298.29 in 1999-2000). In addition, the Irish presently have three players with stroke averages at 74.00 or lower (min. 10 rounds) - Cole Isban (73.19), Mark Baldwin (73.52), and Scott Gustafson (73.67), with freshman Josh Sandman (73.17) needing to play four more rounds to join that group. In the 77-year history of the Notre Dame program, the Irish have never had a trio score lower than 75.32 for an entire season (1999-2000 - Todd Vernon at 74.18, Steve Ratay at 74.54 and Alex Kent at 75.32).

One other item to watch is Notre Dame's progress on a round-by-round basis in each tournament. This season, the Irish are averaging a 297.22 in their opening round before trimming that score to 293.78 in round two. However, Notre Dame has saved its best round for last, firing a 292.89 on average this season.

Tough Enough
When it comes to scheduling, the philosophy of Notre Dame head coach Jim Kubinski centers around playing in the nation's top tournaments on the country's best courses in order to prepare his team for postseason competition. Heading into the BIG EAST Championship, the Irish schedule is ranked 53rd in the nation, according to the latest Golfweek rankings (as of April 17). No other squad in this year's BIG EAST field has played a harder schedule, with Louisville (No. 81), USF (No. 108) and Marquette (No. 138) the only other teams among the top 150 nationally in that category.

Upon closer inspection, nine of the 10 tournaments Notre Dame has played this year are ranked among the 51 toughest in the nation for the 2005-06 season by Golfweek (as of April 17), including five in the top 30. Leading the way is the Administaff Augusta State Invitational (12th), followed by the CordeValle Collegiate (20th), Shoal Creek Intercollegiate (22nd), Gopher Invitational (26th) and Coca-Cola Duke Classic (29th).

Some of the premier courses the Irish already have played this year include: Shoal Creek Country Club in Birmingham (site of the 1984 and 1990 PGA Championships), the famed PGA WEST facility in La Quinta, Calif. (site of numerous PGA Tour events in the past two decades), the TPC of Myrtle Beach (S.C.), and the Birck Boilermaker Golf Complex/Kampen Course in West Lafayette, Ind. (site of three previous NCAA regionals/finals and host of the 2008 NCAA Men's Golf Championships).

Last Time Out: Boilermaker Invitational
Notre Dame fired the second-best round of the day with a five-over par 293 on April 9 to lock up a solid third-place finish at the 12-team Boilermaker Invitational, which was contested on the Kampen Course (par 72/7,083 yards) at Purdue's Birck Boilermaker Golf Complex in West Lafayette, Ind. En route to their best team finish of the season, the Irish completed the two-day event with a score of 36-over par 900 (307-300-293).

Junior tri-captain Cole Isban and freshman Josh Sandman each collected a share of second place in the 62-man field, despite varying final-round results. Isban came into the day two shots off the lead, but couldn't make up any ground and ended up with a four-over par 220 (74-72-74). Meanwhile, Sandman charged hard from the middle of the pack with the second-best score of the day, a final-round 69, to match Isban's 220 total (77-74-69).

Senior tri-captain Scott Gustafson ended up tied for 30th place at the Boilermaker Invitational with a 15-over par 231 (80-76-75). Fellow senior tri-captain Mark Baldwin was among a five-way tie in 38th place at 17-over par 233 (80-78-75), while junior Adam Gifford wrapped up his first tournament of the season in a 50th-place deadlock at 21-over par 237 (76-83-78).

Next Up For The Irish: The Maxwell (May 13-14)
Notre Dame will close out the 2005-06 regular season May 13-14 when it heads to Ardmore, Okla., for The Maxwell, to be played at Dornick Hills Country Club. It will be the first-ever appearance for the Irish at the prestigious tournament, which is co-hosted by Oklahoma State and Oklahoma, and is considered one of the top prep events for the NCAA regionals, scheduled for the following weekend in Orlando (East), Chardon, Ohio (Central) and Tucson (West).