Washington State Athletic Director Bill Moos is not sending his men’s golf team on a trip to Orlando for a weekend date with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Instead, it will be having a tea time with the No.1 ranked team in the country – the University of Illinois – on the golf course Tiger Woods grew up practicing on.

“The field is extremely elite,” Head Coach Garrett Clegg said. “It really is an honor just to be selected to go there and compete. But with that in mind, we’re there to perform well and get better.”

A tournament that has earned a reputation as one of the premier tournaments in collegiate golf, WSU has the opportunity to compete at Isleworth Golf & Country Club in Windermere, Florida, a course that rivals in regard and difficulty of playing a PGA Tour event.

The 15-team field is deep, with the likes of last year’s NCAA Championship quarterfinalist Vanderbilt and respected programs in California, Ohio State and North Carolina joining the Fighting Illini and co-hosts Central Florida and Texas Tech.

“We’ve seen the field,” sophomore Derek Bayley said. “The best team in the nation is Illinois, and Illinois is there. I think ultimately all that we can do is just be ourselves out there and add (the scores) up at the end. You can’t be trying to do something special, you just have to let it happen.”

The Cougars are coming off of an impressive performance at their home event, the Itani Quality Homes Collegiate, in which they won the tournament with a score of 33-under par (819) and finished twenty strokes in front of second place Seattle University. Derek Bayley won the individual tournament with a three-round score of 5-under (201) and had a particularly impressive first day of golf, recording no bogeys on a 36-hole day.

In order to compete with what is easily considered some of the nation’s best, everyone in the program knows that it will take a similar effort. Clegg said the varsity five will remain the same as it was at the Itani (Bayley, Aaron Whalen, AJ Armstrong, Zach Anderson, Nick Mandell).

“Usually, whenever we win tournament, we keep the same lineup for the next one,” Clegg said.

“I think for me, what I have to do is get our guys motivated and ready to succeed,” Bayley said. “And I think that if we go out there and play well we can win the thing. I mean we shot a 29-under at a 36-hole day just the other week and that shows that the lineup we have has the mindset of going in and expecting to win. We can’t just think of being included in the field as enough.”

Clegg has high expectations for this program and knows his team will have to perform better against stiffer competition than it did in its first two tournaments if it is to compete in Florida and move towards a postseason berth.

“I expect to qualify for the postseason,” Clegg said of his goals for the year. “We’ve played good competition and this is a really talented group, but they’re young. It’s a matter of developing quickly. This tournament will be a good challenge for them.”

Bayley, co-captain with Mandell, wants to be the guy who leads this team back to regionals for the first time in 13 years. This next week should indicate how close or far away he may be from doing so.

The Tavistock Collegiate Invitational will begin Sunday, Oct. 18.