Oct. 12, 2000

The University of Notre Dame women's golf program will play host to the 10-team Notre Dame Invitational, to be held during the weekend of Oct. 14-15 at the Warren Golf Course.

The tournament will feature an 8:30 a.m. shotgun start on both days, with 36 holes scheduled for Saturday and 18 for Sunday. The event is open to the public and admission is free.

The 10-team field will include the host Irish, plus six-player squads from Ball State, Butler, Dayton, Illinois State, IUPUI, Northern Illinois, Princeton, Western Michigan and Xavier. In addition to Notre Dame's official six-player squad, seven other members of the Irish varsity team will compete as individual entrants.

Warren Golf Course-located near the northeast corner of the Notre Dame campus-opened in the spring of 2000 and was site of the BIG EAST Men's Golf Championship in late April. Designed by the Austin, Texas-based architectural team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, the course is patterned after the classic, walkable Irish and American courses built in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Noted for its dramatic bunkering and strategically-designed greens, the Warren Golf Course has been nominated for the nation's "best new golf course" by both Golf and GolfWeek magazines.

Par for the tournament has been set at 72, with a yardage of 5,955.

The Notre Dame women's golf team previously has played host to four intercollegiate on-campus tournaments, since the founding of the program in 1988. Notre Dame Invitationals were held at the original Notre Dame Memorial Golf Course during the falls of 1988, '89 and '90 and the spring of '94 (shortly before that course was converted to its present nine-hole configuration).

The Irish women also recently played host to off-campus Notre Dame Invitationals in Bonita Bay, Fla., during the spring of 1998 and '99.