GOODYEAR, Ariz. --- Biola Women's Golf picked right back up where it left off its successful 2018-19 season during the first round of the RJGA Shootout at Estrella on Monday. The Eagles found themselves as high as fourth-place just after the opening nine holes and finished the first round with a team score of 303 that placed them neck-and-neck with the other PacWest team in the field. 

Biola will head into Tuesday two strokes behind Point Loma and just eight strokes outside of the top-three on the team leaderboard. 

After starting the day on the back nine, Head Coach Jane Carr's group really hit their stride around holes three through seven. The four scoring members of Biola's contingent combined for five birdies over that stretch while Jules Loibl rattled off five-straight putts for par to help improve the team's combined score to +5 at one point. Loibl will head into the second day with her team's second-best score at 76 (+4) after picking up a birdie on eight that solidified her strong round. 

Biola's individual scores were led from start to finish by sophomore Sami Penor, who walked off the course at even-par (72) and never dropped further than +1 the entire day. Penor started her playthrough with a quick birdie on her second hole, the par-four 12th, and followed that with back-to-back birdies on holes five and six to place herself in a tie for fifth place after day one. 

The Henderson, Nevada-native is tied with a familiar opponent in Point Loma's Alli Kim for fifth-place and for the top rank among the 11 PacWest golfers in the tournament. 

Marcel Manalo also saw time in the top-10 on Monday and was -1 through 12 holes before finishing her round in a tie for 36th place. Compared to her last visit to Estrella GC two years ago, Manalo improved her first-round score (77) by four strokes and figures to have an even better showing on Tuesday given her recent history in Goodyear. She shaved off six strokes in second round at this tournament in 2017. 

The Eagles' fourth scoring card came from senior Alexis Gopfert, who was even-par on the back nine and posted a great end to her round with four-consecutive putts for par. Gopfert, like Loibl and Tori Roeske, is playing this course for the third time is as many years and saw second-day improvements each of her previous two times as Estrella. And despite a triple bogey on nine, Gopfert was still able to match her first-round score from 2018 (78) with the help of birdies on five and 15. 

Roeske is playing the Shootout as an individual and is currently second among individual players in the field with her score of 83 over the first 18 holes. Roeske, like Rachel Reynolds, who completed her round with an 87 for Biola, showed good signs at several points throughout the course that kept her score stable. She was the only Eagle beside Penor and Loibl to avoid a bogey on holes five through eight, while Reynolds was the only member of the team to earn a birdie on the par-three seven. 

The Eagles will return to Estrella GC Tuesday morning to finish out the RJGA Shootout.