The Iowa women’s golf team is set to tee off at the Westbrook Spring Invitational in Peoria, Arizona, Sunday morning at 9:30 a.m.

The Hawkeyes — coming off their best team finish since 2021 in their most recent tournament — will take on 13 other schools on the Vistas course in the three-round, two-day event.

Teams will play 36 holes on Sunday and the final 18 on Monday. Iowa is set to play against College of Charleston, Denver, Kansas, Kansas State, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Penn State, Rutgers, UNLV, and Wisconsin. College of Charleston, Denver, Nebraska, and Ohio State each rank inside the GolfState top-50 team rankings checking in at 36th, 44th, 49th, and 24th, respectively.

“It’s an interesting event because the scores are typically low,” Iowa head coach Megan Menzel said. So you know, you kind of gotta get hot. You can have a pretty good week and not perform well in the team standings, so we’ve talked about that a lot. I think they’ll enjoy this golf course. There’s a lot of Hawkeye fans out there. And it’s a great environment for sure. So we always enjoy that. 

“We’ve been trying to get our putting strokes dialed in it comes down to being able to roll in some putts and then I think just good course management and you can have some good looks out there.”

Iowa has played in the Westbrook Spring Invitational for the last eight seasons — with the exception of the COVID-altered 2020-21 season — but hasn’t finished in the top half of the field at that event since 2016-17 when the Hawkeyes were fifth out of 13 teams. 

However, the Hawkeyes are riding momentum into Arizona this week after their fifth-place showing at the Tulane Classic to open the spring season from Feb. 12-14 in New Orleans.

Iowa tallied a 55-over-par team total of 919 at the Tulane Classic and freshman Madison Dabagia led the team and turned in her best collegiate finish individually — a tie for eighth at 10-over-par.

Dabagia tallied only one double-bogey over the three rounds at the Tulane Classic. The scoring average hovered near 79 strokes per round. 

“I had a couple goals going into the week and [no double-bogeys] was definitely one of them,” Dabagia said. “Sometimes those numbers just kind of add up for me. So yeah, that was pretty nice … Playing smart, we’ve been working on chipping a lot. So I would say just getting those up-and-downs is crucial even if it’s for bogey, those six-footers are just crucial.”

Dabagia said she enjoys playing a more demanding course like the one the Hawkeyes saw at the Tulane Classic, but also teeing it up at a track that lends itself to lower scores.

“I love for the course to be hard, but it’s kind of nice when we’re expecting for this course to be a little bit, I wouldn’t say easier, but more birdie opportunities,” Dabagia said. We’re gonna have to go out there and make some birdies make some stuff happen.”

Dabagia will join freshmen Riley Lewis, Shannyn Vogler, and Kaitlyn Hanna, along with sophomore Paula Miranda. Senior Jordan Amelon will be competing as an individual. Live scoring can be found here. 

Iowa will be sporting “LZ” patches on its golf bags this week in support of teammate Lea Zeitler, whose mom passed away recently.