Big 12 women’s golf: BYU will face tough competition in Texas and Oklahoma State

Editor’s note: Eleventh in a series of articles examining how each BYU program will stack up against its new conference foes. Today’s program: women’s golf.

The BYU women’s golf program comes into the fall of 2023 after finishing last season ranked No. 64 in the final Golfweek/Sagarin Rankings and second at the WCC championships.

Such a season has been fairly standard for the Cougars throughout their history. BYU did have a run of three straight conference titles from 2016-18, but those were the first championships since 1992.

BYU has competed in the NCAA postseason 19 times, most recently in 2022. The Cougars’ last NCAA championships appearance was in 2016, finishing 24^th. BYU has finished in the top 25 five times in program history, with the highest all-time finish coming in 1982 at 12th overall.

In addition, three alumnae play on the LPGA Tour: Pam Miller Gietzen, Chris Lehmann Vatcher and Carrie Summerhays Roberts, the Cougars’ current head coach.

Now with a fresh conference comes a fresh start and a young roster. Only one senior, Lila Galeai, returns. She’ll be joined by junior Adeline Anderson, who won the 2023 BYU Riverside Classic and finished a team-best sixth at the conference tournament last year, and sophomore Berlin Long, who qualified for the U.S. Women’s Amateur Championship starting Aug. 7.

Lily DeNunzio from Henderson, Nevada, and Maria Barragan out of Morelia, Mexico, signed with the Cougars in November and are new to the roster. Incoming transfers include sophomore Lily McCauley, who is going from one Cougars team to the next after playing a year at Washington State, and sophomore Whitney Banz, who attended Westminster in Salt Lake City for the 2020-21 school year and was a two-sport athlete on both the golf and basketball teams before serving a church mission in Thailand.

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Big 12 women’s golf

Every program except West Virginia sponsors women’s golf in the conference. Last year, Oklahoma State claimed its 11^th Big 12 title and its second in three years with a seven-stroke victory over second-place Baylor. Texas or Oklahoma State has won every Big 12 championship since 2016.

Nine Big 12 teams played in the 2023 NCAA postseason with Baylor, Oklahoma State, TCU, Texas, and Texas Tech among the 30 teams to advance out of Regionals to play in the finals. The Longhorns managed to make it the eight-team match play bracket before bowing out.

Only TCU has ever won an NCAA championship, doing so in 1983, but Baylor (2015), Oklahoma (2014), Oklahoma State (2004, ’16, ’21) and Texas (2002) have all finished national runner-up.

How will BYU fare?

Every Big 12 program has competed in the NCAA postseason each of the last three years except four: BYU, Cincinnati, Kansas and Kansas State. The Cougars will likely have to fight to stay out of the bottom portion of the league; a conference championship isn’t in the near future. But a P5 bump in recruiting, funding and competition will improve a program that has been to the postseason four times in the last seven seasons.