Nine British & Irish players in field for start of

Orange Blossom Tour at Harder Hall, Florida

There are five Scots among the nine British & Irish players in the field for this week's Harder Hall Women's Invitational, the first event on the Orange Blossom Tour in Florida.

The six Stirling University students who will be in action in the four-round stroke-play event for amateurs at Harder Hall Country Club, Sebring are: Kelsey MacDonald (Nairn Dunbar), Eilidh Mackay (Nairn Dunbar), Rebecca Wilson (Monifieth), Jordana Graham (Southerness), Harriet Beasley (Woburn) and Rachael Cassidy (The Island, Dublin).

Ranfurly Castle member Laurin Mackin, who lives on Majorca, is also in the field as are Kelsey MacDonald's Curtis Cup squad colleagues, England international Holly Clyburn (Woodhall Spa) and Welsh international Lucy Gould (Bargoed), pictured right during the women's home internationals at Irvine GC last September, who will be at East Tennessee State University until December 2010 to complete her MBA (masters in business administration).

Title favourite will be 14-year-old Alexis Thompson, the Florida resident who won the Junior Orange Bowl girls' title last week and finished joint runner-up with Holly Clyburn behind Lindy Duncan (Duke University) in the Women's Dixie Amateur which finished on Sunday. Duncan is not in field for the Harder Hall Invitational which tees off on Wednesday and ends Saturday.

Defending the title in a field of 100, plus 44 seniors, is Candace Schepperle from Birmingham, Alabama. She won by seven strokes with a 72-hole aggregate of 274 last year. Holly Clyburn finished seventh with 289 which had very good rounds of 67 and 68 sandwiched between an opening 78 and a closing 75.

Kelsey MacDonald was down the 2009 field with a total of 306.

Chairman of the Harder Hall Invitational tournament committee is former US Curtis Cup player and captain of the 2008 team who won over the Old Course, St Andrews - Carol Semple Thompson, a winner three times in a row of the Harder Hall Women's Invitational from 1990 to 1992.

The evergreen Carol usually combines playing with running the show ... but not this week.

Five weeks ago she broke her left wrist and is still on the mend.

“The plate and screws are going to give me the perfect putting stroke and 15 more yards - guaranteed,” said Carol who first played in the event in 1970 and reckons that she missed only a handful of years since then.

It's not cheap to play on the Orange Blossom Tour. The entry fee for the Harder Hall Invitational is $250 but that also covers a Pizza Party on the Tuesday and a Players' Dinner on the Friday.

The Orange Blossom Tour moves on next week (January 13 to 16) to "The Sally," short for South Atlantic Amateur Ladies championship at Oceanside Country Club, Ormond Beach. Two more players out to impress the GB&I selectors - left-handed English champion Charlie Douglass (Brockett Hall) and Scotland's Louise Kenney (Pitreavie), winner of the Angela Uzielli Trophy in fourth place at the British stroke-play at Balgownie last year - will join the field there.
Louise flies out on Sunday to play in the next two Orange Blossom competitions.
Then, from January 18 to 23 there's the Jones/Doherty match-play event, hosted by Coral Ridge Country Club at Fort Lauderdale.
With the help of our friends across the water, including Carol Semple Thompson, we'll have the results at the end of each day's play on this website.