Carlsbad, Calif. – Georgia Tech, seeded No. 13 and coming off a fourth-place finish last week at the NCAA Chapel Hill Regional, is set to begin competition in the NCAA Division I Men’s Championship finals for the 33rd time in program history, looking for the program’s first national championship, when the Yellow Jackets tee off Friday morning at the Omni LaCosta Resort and Spa.
Head coach Bruce Heppler’s 29th Tech team returns three starters from a team that finished runner-up at the 2023 championship in Scottsdale, Ariz. Since the NCAA added match play to the format to determine its champion in 2009, the Yellow Jackets have advanced to match play five times and looks to return for the second straight year.
Tech enters the NCAA Championship having finished third at the ACC Championship last month before advancing through the Chapel Hill Regional. The Yellow Jackets have the ACC Player of the Year and the nation’s No. 5-ranked player in senior Christo Lamprecht (George, South Africa), as well as two other players with NCAA Championship experience in senior Bartley Forrester (Gainesville, Ga.) and sophomore Hiroshi Tai (Singapore).
Tech tees off at 4:50 p.m. Eastern time Friday afternoon (hole No. 10) and 11:30 a.m. Saturday morning (1st hole), paired with No. 14 seed East Tennessee State, who finished second at the Chapel Hill (N.C.) Regional, and No. 15 seed California, who finished second at the Rancho Santa Fe (Calif.) Regional.
Tee times and pairings for the remaining rounds of stroke play will be determined by team position on the leaderboard. Thirty teams will play 54 holes Friday through Sunday, with the field cut to 15 for the final round of stroke play Monday, after which the individual champion will be crowned. The top eight teams after 72 holes will advance to a match play bracket to determine the team champion on Wednesday.
Auburn, the nation’s top-ranked team and the winner of the Baton Rouge (La.) Regional last week, is the top seed at the NCAA Championship, followed by Vanderbilt (winner of the West Lafayette, Ind., Regional), North Carolina (third at Chapel Hill), Tennessee (runner-up at the Austin, Texas, Regional), Florida State (runner-up at the Stanford, Calif., Regional), Texas (champion at Austin), Virginia (runner-up at Baton Rouge), Texas Tech (third at Baton Rouge), Oklahoma (champion at Rancho Santa Fe), Arizona (fourth at West Lafayette), Illinois (champion at Stanford) and Florida (third at West Lafayette).