Live Scoring  |  First Round Pairings

MUSCLE SHOALS, Ala. – The men's golf team will begin play on Sunday at the 2021 Ohio Valley Conference Championship, which will be contested over three days at The Shoals on the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
 
EKU has placed among the top four at the conference championship 38 times in the last 42 events.  Eastern Kentucky's 12 championships are the most by any current OVC member.  No other current league member has more than eight titles.
 
The OVC Championship will be played on the Fighting Joe course.  The course will play to 7,258 yards with a par of 72.  The OVC Championship was held at The Shoals seven times previously (2009, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019).  The event was not held in 2020 due to COVID-19.

Eastern Kentucky will begin teeing off at 10:30 a.m. ET on Sunday.  EKU will be paired with Austin Peay and Tennessee Tech for the first round.
 
The Colonels finished in the top-10 at four of their six tournaments, including a season-best tie for sixth at the Bobby Nichols Intercollegiate in March.  EKU has a team scoring average of 299.2 this season. 
 
The five participating Colonels are seniors Billy Basham and Andreas Nielsen, juniors Willis Gaer and Markus Lindgren and freshman Pablo Carrascosa Vivas. The alternate is Cade Burdette.
 
Basham leads the team with a 74.53 stroke average.  His best finish was a tie for fourth at the LaTour Intercollegiate.  His best 54-hole total of the season, 220, came at the Rutherford Intercollegiate last week.
 
Nielson carries a 75.71 stroke average and had a tie for ninth place at the Bobby Nichols Intercollegiate.
 
Gaer comes in second on the team with a 75.24 stroke average.  Lindgren has a 77.71 stroke average.  Carrascosa has a 76.12 average and is coming off his best three-round scores of the season, shooting 223 in each of the last two tournaments.
 
The Shoals is home to two 18-hole championship courses and lies between the Wheeler and Wilson dams on the Tennessee River.  The Fighting Joe course at The Shoals was the first Trail course to break 8,000 yards.  Travel + Leisure Golf named Fighting Joe one of the top new courses in 2004.
 
The 10 participating teams include Austin Peay, Belmont, Eastern Illinois, Eastern Kentucky, Jacksonville State, Morehead State, Murray State, Southern Illinois Edwardsville, Tennessee Tech and Tennessee-Martin.