Women’s golf is headed to Rio Verde, Ariz., for the 18-team Rio Verde Invitational.

Practice rounds for the tournament begin today, and competition begins with a round-a-day format across three days beginning Friday.

NIU participated in this invitational last season, but did not have a strong showing, finishing 12th (307,311,618) out of 17.

Last year, the top three finishers were Northern Arizona, Xavier, and Arkansas-Little Rock respectively. The three teams are returning for competition this year to compete for top honors in back to back seasons.

NIU is coming off a sixth out of 16 place finish at host Texas A&M-Corpus Christi’s Islander Classic on Feb. 24-25. The Huskies’ 299 round three card during the tournament was the best score of any round during Kim Kester’s two year tenure as head coach.

The card was a solid overall effort with a few standout individuals. Freshman Sydney Brickey overcame a round of 80 during the first day and came back strong for her third round putting up NIU’s fourth best single round mark of 71.

Sophomore Connie Ellett, who was named MAC golfer of the week due to her performance, also had a great outing shooting a 76, 77 and 75.

Ellett said she loves the play of the Huskies as a whole and is hoping they can continue that in Arizona.

“It’s really nice to see everyone playing well at the same time because that’s where we struggled before,” Ellett said. “I’d like to see our team continue our spectacular play because breaking 300 was a really good feeling because we’ve been trying to break that since I came in, we’ve gotten close a couple times but it was finally nice to see us do it and we know that we can do it.”

Kester sees NIU’s low rounds of 306 and 299 as big improvements from the fall semester. With a tournament this size the Huskies are looking to make yet another statement with their already impressive play.

“You always want to win especially for a tournament this size,” Kester said. “That many schools, but a top five performance would be fantastic. Putting us in the top five would be outstanding it’s going to take a lot of hard work and great play but our girls have been showing that already and they are definitely taking a lot of momentum with them off of Corpus Christi after the 299 and the 306 rounds that they know they can shoot that often. All it takes is three great rounds and we’ll see what happens.”

Kester said this will be a nice place to see some conference competition as well as seven of the 18 competitors they will see are from the MAC.