Foreign Legion

The West Coast Conference championships are less than two weeks away and soon after that the NCAA playoffs begin, but the top two female golfers at Pepperdine have already taken their games to another level.

The LPGA, to be exact.

Katherine Hull and Lindsey Wright, Pepperdine’s Australian All-Americans, have been the talk of college golf as Pepperdine has cruised to four consecutive victories over the last two months. Their reward for helping Pepperdine vault from No. 15 to No. 2 in the national rankings is a glimpse of the professional life.

Wright made her LPGA Tour debut when she played in the Kraft Nabisco Championship as an amateur last week in Rancho Mirage and finished tied for 57th. Hull will also play as an amateur when she makes her debut this week at the Office Depot Championship Hosted by Amy Alcott at El Caballero Country Club in Tarzana.

“I’m just treating it like any other tournament,” Hull said. “I know it’s against professionals, but I’m not going to play any different than I have been.”

Which lately has been pretty good.

Hull has won three of the last four college tournaments she has entered and broke her own NCAA single-round scoring record when she shot 63 during the first round of the San Jose State Invitational March 4.

She has a national-best 71.74 scoring average and is ranked first or second in the nation, depending on which poll you follow.

Wright is ranked No. 4 in both major polls and her 72.87 scoring average ranks fourth. She has finished in the top six in her last six tournaments and leads the nation in greens in regulation. She shot 65 and held the course record at Corral de Tierra Country Club in Monterey for about half an hour before Hull finished her 63 in the same round.

“She was like, ‘You stole my thunder, girl,’ ” Hull said. “And I was like, ‘Sorry, dude.’ ”

Hull went on to shoot 66 in the final round, part of her NCAA-record 54-hole score of 200. The Waves set NCAA team records with a first-round 275 and a 54-hole 846.

Wright was a semifinalist at the U.S. Women’s Amateur last summer and was runner up at the Women’s British Amateur. Last October, Hull and Wright traveled to Malaysia and led Australia to the Women’s World Amateur team championship, its first since 1978.

Last summer, Hull tried to qualify for the U.S. Amateur Public Links championships -- the men’s Public Links. That was before Suzy Whaley qualified for the PGA’s Greater Hartford Open and before Annika Sorenstam accepted a sponsor’s exemption to the PGA Bank of America Colonial.

Hull said the qualifier fit her schedule better than some of the women’s tournaments at the time. She also happened to be playing well, coming off a then-NCAA record 64 performance in a college tournament. She shot 75 from the back tees and missed qualifying by one stroke.

Playing the LPGA Tour is a goal for Hull and Wright and is the primary reason each left Australia for Pepperdine. Both have indicated that they will turn pro soon after the NCAA championships end May 23, but make no mistake, the college season is still the priority.

“We still have three tournaments left,” Hull said. “We think we have a team very capable of winning the national title, so that’s the main focus.”

The two are part of an influx of talented international players in women’s college golf over the last decade. Of the top 100 players in the Golfweek rankings, 41 are from outside the United States. Seven of the top 10 are international players.

Four of the seven players on Pepperdine’s roster are from foreign countries. Carolina Llano, a freshman from Colombia, entered school in January and is a major contributor to Pepperdine’s success this spring. Sophomore Maria Cristina Arenas is from Guatemala.

Wright said college golf in the United States is hard to pass up for international players who don’t have a similar option in their countries.

“You don’t really have anything like this where you can play and get an education,” she said. “A lot of countries are like that. But you can come here, and college golf is probably the best amateur golf in the world. You’re playing that every week and getting an education; who wouldn’t want to do that?”

Wright and Hull, both seniors, will graduate in May. Both are majoring in sports administration, but their real education is happening on the course.

“I think they will walk away from these tournaments knowing that they can play out there,” Pepperdine Coach Laurie Gibbs said. “Their games are right there, they aren’t intimidated. They just don’t have the experience.”

Not much, anyway.