January 24, 2025 • by David Tenneson
Several of the nation’s top women’s teams kick off the Spring season at the Moon Golf Invitational in the sunshine state. Louisville’s ‘home’ tournament is held at Suntree Country Club in Florida and sponsored by the Moon Golf company.
Less than a decade old, the tournament has quickly become one of the premiere events to start the second half of the college golf season, and it has a unique backstory. Golf historian David Tenneson looks back at its short but rich history.
Dan Moon and Anne Hutto (below) met on a golf course in Auburn, Alabama while at college in the early 2000s and golf continued to be a major part of the couple’s lives. They married, moved to Florida, and eventually started a company bearing their name.
The Moon Golf company began life in 2015 when the Moons took over an existing retail golf store. Leveraging their golf retail experience and understanding of the custom fitting experience, Anne and Dan have grown the Moon Golf business to the point where they recently opened a third location back where it all began.
Why does a company started 70 miles east of Orlando, with a branch in Alabama, sponsor a tournament for Louisville, KY? The answer lies with former Louisville Head Coach Courtney (Swaim) Trimble (below), who was Anne (Hutto) Moon’s teammate at Auburn.
In 2018, the pair worked together to inaugurate the Moon Golf Invitational, held at Suntree CC (below) in Florida. “I love the idea of getting behind women’s golf and good college golf because the local girls around here in the high schools, a lot of them are going to come be volunteers in the tournament,” Moon told Sports Illustrated. “… Being a female business owner and having been a female college golfer, I just thought, How cool would it be to have our own college tournament?”
Trimble is now the President and CEO of FORE HIRE, a recruitment firm helping former college golfers. Her former assistant and now head coach Whitney Young has continued the tournament and Trimble still acts as tournament director.
Ten of the players on the final 2024-25 ANNIKA award fall watch list will be in this year’s field including players from LSU, FSU, Wake Forest, Texas, and Auburn.
Furman’s Natalie Srinivisan earned her third individual victory in the COVID-shortened 2019-20 season at the Moon Golf Invitational, and went on to be voted the ANNIKA Award winner as the top player in women’s D1 golf that year. This made Furman one of only two schools (UCLA was the other) to have both a male and female player earn the Haskins and ANNIKA awards, college golf's equivalent of the Heisman Award.
The 2022 individual Moon Golf medalist Ingrid Lindblad of LSU (above) etched her name on the ANNIKA Award trophy just last year.
2021 was the year of Pauline Roussin-Bouchard. The South Carolina super sophomore opened with a sizzling 9-under par 63 to set the tournament and program 18-hole scoring record.
The second round was even better for the Gamecocks as they broke the tournament team scoring record with a 275/-13 behind Pauline’s 67. South Carolina ended up taking home both team and individual titles in record setting fashion.
In 2023, current Florida State teammates Lottie Woad and Mirabel Ting (below) sat just one shot out of the lead going into the final round. But on this occasion they were not rooting for each other.
Ting, who was playing for Augusta at the time, went on to match the tournament record of 203 (-13) set by Roussin-Bouchard. She was caught by Leila Raines of Michigan State who shot a final round 65 (-7), forcing a playoff for medalist honors.
Ting ultimately secured her first collegiate victory with a walk-off 50-foot putt in the playoff.
LSU ran away with the team title in 2023, breaking a host of records along the way. Not only did they set the 18- (274/-14), 36- (550/-26), and 54-hole scoring records (834/-30), they also set the record for lowest round drop score (71/-1) and total drop score (217/+1).
All five Tigers finished inside the top 25 with Ingrid Lindblad (2022 winner) and Carla Tejedo Mulet finishing T5.
Ingrid Lindblad recorded top-10 finishes — 9th, 1st, T5, T2 — in all four years playing this event, finishing up by going close again in 2024 when LSU became the first team to win this event multiple times.
Maisie Filler (Florida) earned her third consecutive tournament medalist honors - and the #1 individual ranking - over a who’s-who top 10 that included Lindblad and her teammate Aine Donegan, Rachel Kuehn (Wake Forest), eventual NCAA champion Adela Cernousek (Texas A&M), Katie Poots (UCF), Mirabel Ting and Lottie Woad (FSU), Latanna Stone (LSU), Celina Sattelkau (Vanderbilt), and Kennedy Carroll (Augusta, now Alabama).
The first three Moon Golf medalists — Alice Chen (Furman, 2018), Lauren Hartlage (Louisville, 2019), Natalie Srinivasan (Furman, 2020) — all received invites to the inaugural Augusta National Women’s Amateur (ANWA) in 2019.
This year, both the 2022 ANWA champ Anna Davis (Auburn, above) and the reigning ANWA champion Lottie Woad will look to add the Moon Golf trophy to their impressive collection of individual titles.
When the Moon Golf Invitational was created in 2018, the goal had been to become one of the top tournaments in the early Spring season calendar. That first year they hosted four of the top 50 teams in the country.
This year, 14 of the teams in the field rank inside the top 50 with three of those currently ranked inside the top 10. There’s a decent chance that the team that steals the Moon in 2025 might be placing it next to the NCAA championship trophy in their home facility at the end of the season.