BATON ROUGE - The LSU Tiger men's golf team looks to improve on their first day of play at the NCAA Baton Rouge Regional as they fired a team score of seven over par which has them sitting in tenth place after the first round.

Tiger golfer Connor Gaunt is tied for second place after he recorded a 4-under round of 68 to lead the Tigers on opening day.

As a team, LSU finished round one of the NCAA Regional at 7-over 295 and tied for ninth place at the University Club in Baton Rouge on Monday.  

The Tigers will have two rounds left to play as they look to climb into the top five before the end of the day on Wednesday.

The top five teams and one individual not on that team will advance to play in the NCAA Championship on May 24-28 at the Omni La Costa Resort & Spa in Carlsbad, Calif. LSU is currently 4-strokes away from 5th place. 

“I feel good about the team moving forward because we finished well and gave ourselves a chance to be right in this thing,” said interim head coach Andrew Nelson.  “We’re four shots out of 5th place and all you need is to be top five. You never want to play for 5th but we’re only four shots away from where we need to be.”

Virginia leads the field after an 8-under 280 in the opening round led by the individual leader, Deven Patel who posted a 5-under 67 and holds a one-stroke lead over Gaunt.

Luke Haskew earned the next best score for the Tigers with a 3-over 75. Haskew birdied twice and put together a good round on his home course. The Baton Rouge native is a graduate of University High. 

Alex Price and Jay Mendell both finished at 4-over 76 as the final two contributing scores for LSU. Price started the day with a double bogey on No. 1 but tallied four birdies on the front to get to 2-under 34 at the turn. Price was 6-over 42 on the back to end the day 4-over 76. Mendell had three birdies in round one and was 2-over heading into the final hole. Mendell double bogeyed the difficult 458-yard par four at No. 18 to end the day. 

LSU will tee off in round two on Tuesday starting as early as 9:25 in the morning. Live stats can be found at Golfstat.com.

Pos     Team               R1

1  Virginia                     280      -8

2  Auburn                     285      -3

T3  Ohio State             289 +1

T3  Houston                289      +1

5  Duke                         291      +3

T6  Texas Tech           292      +4

T6  Oregon                  292      +4

8  South Carolina       293      +5

9  Lipscomb                294      +6

10  LSU                      295      +7

11  Louisville               301     +13

12  Loyola Maryland  310     +22

13  Yale                         320     +32

14 UAPB                       321     +33