Despite being known for its sunny skies and beautiful weather, San Diego has not been kind to the women’s golf team the last two years. The Longhorns’ first round was postponed Sunday due to unusual hail and inclement weather at the Battle at Rancho Bernardo Inn. The teams will tee off today instead.

At last year’s event, then-junior Nicole Vandermade had a great outing, finishing 13th overall to lead Texas to a team finish of 8 out of the 18 teams competing. Vandermade struggled at the last tournament in South Carolina, but she should feel better about this familiar course.

“This course favors Nicole because there are some par 5s that she can reach in two [strokes],” head coach Martha Richards said. “There’s a lot of golf courses where Nicole doesn’t get to use her driver because she hits it so long, but this golf course allows her to have an advantage on the par 5s and a couple of the longer par 4s.”

Richards said he understood the team’s frustration in trying to get their scores on the board. “They played hard the whole time and never gave up, so I know we are very close to playing good golf,” he said.

Fellow Big 12 rival Texas A&M is among the six other teams currently ranked ahead of the Longhorns in the field this week. The last time Texas saw the Aggies was in the 2011 season opener in Bryan, Texas, where the Longhorns took home the championship trophy, besting Texas A&M by 36 strokes. Texas A&M has finished in the top five in four of the last five tournaments, and is coming off their first win of the season in Hawaii.

“Hopefully the last couple weeks of work will pay off. You just never know when it’s all going to click,” Richards said. “If we just get a little better each day, it’s going to start showing up in the scores.”