CSU women, who qualify a full team for NCAA regionals for first time since 2010, headed to Vegas, while DU bound for Michigan; Lauren Lehigh, Ashley Kozlowski and CU’s Morgan Miller and Sabrina Iqbal also advance to regionals
By Gary Baines – 4/24/2024
The Colorado State women’s golf team won a program-record three team titles this season, and apparently the Rams needed them all as they were one of the final at-large selections for the NCAA Division I regionals.
CSU will advance a full team to the NCAA regionals for the first time since 2010 as it earned the No. 9 seed in the Las Vegas Regional that will be played May 6-8. UCLA will be the top seed in that region. This is the fifth time overall that the Rams have qualified a full team for NCAA regionals, following 2001, ’02, ’05 and ’10. CSU’s Sofia Torres competed as an individual at regionals last year, finishing 24th in Westfield, Ind.
Also landing a spot in the 2024 women’s NCAA regionals — as announced on Wednesday on Golf Channel — was the University of Denver, which gained an automatic berth for the 19th time in the last 20 years the NCAAs have been contested, in this instance by winning the Summit League championship on Tuesday. The Pioneers, bound for NCAA regionals for the 22nd straight time overall, are seeded seventh in East Lansing, Mich., where USC is the top seed.
And three local golfers earned NCAA regional berths as individuals — Lauren Lehigh of Loveland and the University of New Mexico (Las Vegas Regional) and University of Colorado teammates Morgan Miller and Sabrina Iqbal (both in Cle Elum, Wash.). Lehigh, a U.S. Women’s Amateur quarterfinalist in 2022, finished 21st in the NCAA nationals last year. And the presence of Miller, the 2023 CGA Women’s Player of the Year, and Iqbal will extend the college coaching career of Anne Kelly for at least one more tournament. Kelly, the head coach at CU since 1997, announced last fall that she’ll retire after this season. She’ll be replaced by Madeleine Sheils, currently the associate head coach of the CU women’s team.
Also in the NCAA regionals is Ashley Kozlowski of Littleton and Purdue, which qualified a full team for the Las Vegas Regional. And a couple of head coaches who grew up in Colorado led their teams to the regionals — Dawn Shockley at Oregon State (Bermuda Run, N.C. Regional) and Lindsay Kuhle at Kansas (Cle Elum, Wash. Regional).
In all, 72 teams and 36 individuals landed spots in the women’s NCAA Division I regional fields. The top five team finishers and the top individual not on one of those teams will advance from each regional to the NCAA national championships, set for May 17-22 in Carlsbad, Calif.
For the full fields for the women’s NCAA regional tournaments, CLICK HERE.
About the Writer: Gary Baines has covered golf in Colorado continuously since 1983. He was a sports writer at the Daily Camera newspaper in Boulder, then the sports editor there, and has written regularly for ColoradoGolf.org since 2009. The University of Colorado Evans Scholar alum was inducted into the Colorado Golf Hall of Fame in 2022. He owns and operates ColoradoGolfJournal.com