Trickle-down effects of conference realignment leads Nicholls to move golf tourney to fall schedule

Changes in conference realignment have had repercussions on all aspects of college athletics.

You can even include collegiate golf in the mix.

The LaTour Intercollegiate tournament, hosted by Nicholls and held annually at LaTour Country Club has moved from the spring season to the fall.

This year’s event will be held October 23-24 in Mathews.

“We’ll go to the third week of October this year and we’ve got right at 10 Division I team,” said Nicholls golf coach James Schilling. “So it’ll be a nice field, and it’ll be something that that will have right here in the area. The teams will be staying here in the parish in Thibodaux.”

Along with host Nicholls, other schools taking part in the event include Stephen F. Austin, UNO, Southeastern Louisiana, Texas Southern, Central Michigan, Prairie View, Houston Christian, Texas A&M-Commerce, Incarnate Word, and the University of Mobile.

“Basically, every year for your Olympic sports that we have here at Nicholls, you play basically a non-conference schedule with the exception of if you qualify for the Southland Conference Championship, which is at the end of the season. When you combine all of the changes in conferences, the realignments which has some trickle-down effect on what teams have what priorities to play and what markets,” Schilling said.

Even among smaller conferences, there has been realignment. The Southland Conference, of which Nicholls is a member, has seen the recent departure of schools like SFA, Abilene Christian, and Sam Houston State.

“When you combine all of the moving parts that are taking place in athletics right now, you have to find a spot in your schedule where you can get enough teams for it to be worth the work that it requires to put something like that on. You have to have enough teams for it to be worthwhile for the course to close during those days,” Schilling explained.

LaTour features an 18-hole golf course designed by Shreveport native and PGA Tour champion David Toms. The 72-par course sits on 597 acres of rolling grassland and lakes. It features four par-5 holes, two on the front nine and two on the back nine. The length is 7,170 yards and has water hazards on 16 of the 18 holes.

Along with hosting the yearly LaTour Intercollegiate tournament, the course in the past has served as a qualifier for the Zurich Classic before the New Orleans PGA tournament became a team event and featured a stroke-play format.

“Anytime that you have a stroke-play PGA Tour event, you always have an open qualifier,” Schilling noted. “There are a hundred-and-something people playing for two spots, or however many spots it may be.

“That open qualifier was always at LaTour for the Zurich, so you had a lot of guys who maybe had lost their status, who were getting older but they’re not quite there right at 50 (to participate in the Champions Tour), but they can’t compete with the young players on the regular tour.”

“They had lost their status,” he continued. You had guys like Steve Stricker, Lee Janzen, and all these big names that actually have played that golf course to Monday qualify for the tournament.”

LaTour also hosted a U.S. Amateur qualifier a few months before Hurricane Ida hit the area.

“So, you can’t have those type of events and not be a championship design. It’s a first-class designed golf course,” said Schilling.

Nicholls has hosted an annual golf event since 2015, starting with the Atchafalaya Intercollegiate at the Atchafalaya Golf Club in Patterson, which then served as the Colonels’ home course. The tournament was held there through 2017 before the event became the LaTour Intercollegiate in 2018. The course now serves as the home course for Nicholls.

“We had a break with Hurricane Ida when LaTour only had nine holes back open, so we had moved it for one year to Ellendale in Houma, which we do practice there as well. We practice in Ellendale, we practice at LaTour, but we try to keep it in Lafourche. Ellendale has been very good to us,” Schilling said.

The biggest challenge of the LaTour course is the wind.

“Where the golf course is located and where it’s built – you can’t tell now – but right before when you are pulling into it, you have the subdivision and then you have the course, but it’s all sugar cane land,” Schilling pointed out.

“The key out there is going to always be the wind,” the Nicholls coach explained. “The college players will shoot low if there’s no wind, but the wind is the is the defense out there, big time.

“They have trees and stuff like that, but the oak trees and stuff that they have they’re like 8-10 years old, so they’re just not fully mature, like you are going to have there at Ellendale, and stuff like that.”

The tournament, Schilling said, has benefits on numerous fronts.

“It’s exposure for the area,” Schilling said. “There’s an economics benefit. I say this all the time, I don’t know if you have the number of hotels and things that you do without athletics and Nicholls. You get it from August through May. I’ve always been a proponent of that.”

“The players get to have their own local event; we get to have some media coverage.”

It’s also a nice outing for the Nicholls golfers.

“Players always like playing a course that they know because they have an advantage,” said Schilling. “They have an advantage in the there’s just less pressure. They know the course like the back of their hand.”