BATON ROUGE – After a very successful fall season, the seventh ranked LSU men’s team looks to continue its good play when the spring season begins on Monday at the Puerto Rico Classic.

The event will be played over the same Grand Reserve Golf Club course in Rio Grande, Puerto Rico that the LSU women played in a tournament a week ago. The course will again play to par 72, but at a distance of 7,152 yards.

The Tigers, under first year head coach Jake Amos, won twice at the Visit Knoxville event and before the Golf Channel cameras on the difficult Blessings course in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The team also has a second-place finish among its five tournaments in the fall.

Now as LSU prepares to head to the warm climate of Puerto Rico, the team has had the chance to practice for the last week in warm, comfortable conditions that they didn’t have for much of January.

“We have had a great preparation for this tournament,” said Coach Amos. “The weather has been incredible. The last 10 days has been very similar to what we’re going to right now. It’s a lot of our guys first time in Puerto Rico, but I think our preparation went well and they are ready.”

The Tigers as a team are ranked No. 7 in the NCAA performance Scoreboard by Clippd rankings. Two Tigers are ranked in the top 20 NCAA individuals – Algot Kleen at No. 14 and Arni Sveinsson at No. 16.

Kleen, the senior from Sweden, is No. 41 in the World Amateur Golf Rankings and is presently No. 13 in the PGA Tour University rankings. Sveinsson, the freshman from Iceland, is ranked No. 88 in the world rankings.

Both have wins for the Tigers with Kleen capturing the season opener in Knoxville with rounds of 66-65-67 for a 12-under 198 and then Sveinsson solving The Blessings for the championship there with rounds of 71-67-71 for a 7-under 209. Kleen finished a rallying second with a tournament course record of 63 in the final round to finish two shots back.

“I was pleasantly surprised with our play in the fall,” said Coach Amos. “We had lots of new challenges, new people, new expectations so I didn’t know how players were gonna respond to that and how quickly they were gonna buy in. I think it showed that our good is as good as anybody in the country. But I also think we had some lapses in the fall that were really good learning experiences. Another encouraging sign is that we had four individual winners.”

Also winning in the fall in individual events were sophomore Noah McWilliams at the Bayou City Collegiate in Houston and grad. student Nicholas Arcement won the La Tour Intercollegiate in Matthews, Louisiana.

Also in the lineup with Kleen and Sveinsson in Puerto Rico will be sophomore Jay Mendell, junior Alfons Bondesson and Arcement, who will be making his first team appearance of the season.

“It’s great to see Nick break his way into the lineup. I think that shows how deep we are as a squad,” said the first-year LSU coach. “He didn’t play for the team in the fall but had some good individual results and it’s really pushed on his off-season. I think the more competition for spots in the lineup, the better.”

Besides LSU and host Purdue, the 15-team field also includes: Charleston, Georgia, Iowa, Marquette, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Ole Miss, South Carolina, Tennessee, Wisconsin, North Florida, Ohio State and Virginia.

The 54-hole tournament, which runs through Wednesday, begins with a shotgun round on Monday at 6:30 a.m. CT (8:30 a.m. Puerto Rico time). Live scoring can be followed on Golfstat.com (the Puerto Rico green tab). LSU will be paired with two other SEC schools – South Carolina and Tennessee.