Has a timeline been established? Gotta have a coach for recruiting, organization and facility contacts. Home many schollys does the NCAA allow for men’s golf.
It’s an equivalency sport. It’s 4.5 scholarships total that is typically split up. Unless something has changed recently.
What that typically means is that you won’t receive more than half a scholarship and some will receive a token amount. Men’s Golf, on some campuses, I have no idea how’s its handled at TU, is a method to generate academic tuition dollars by providing an inducement to enroll by offering a nominal discount called a
athletics scholarship.
As such, men’s golf as a sport is highly controversial in some circles. Some view it as a “pay to play” sport that exploits parents dreams of their kid making the PGA. They jump on the chance to pay tens of thousands for their son to play golf at the FBS with little or no future in the pro ranks when the child might attend elsewhere at little or no cost if they shopped around. Others view athletics scholarships as a method to encourage social mobility, particularly amongst people of color. Partial funding of golf is viewed as wasting those dollars because so few POC students pursue golf.
Ive always been skeptical of the reasons given for cutting the sport at TU - we supposedly cut it due to austerity needed across the department. Athletics was told to offer up $500,000 goes the story and Gragg chose to submit the entire budget of mens golf at $520,000, rather force football, basketball, soccer and rowing to take haircuts.
To add it back means there’s a combination of booster support and projected tuition revenue justifying bringing it back. A series of phone calls to the right people formerly connected to our golf program could have solved that tension in 2016. Which begs the question of why that wasn’t done in the first place.
In my view, it’s more likely than not, it was an attempt to attach TU to a trend amongst Ivy League and Ivy adjacent schools who were cutting athletics and mens golf in particular for reasons other than financial hardship. Stanford recently settled litigation related to this debate and will not be cutting sports it claimed it needed to cut due to financial loss due to the pandemic — which is laughable at that institution.
University athletics have many benefits beyond educating young people, providing a source of campus cohesion, entertaining the community and raising money.
For schools like TU, struggling for recognition amongst OU, OSU, SMU and Tulane, success in athletics and upward mobility of the athletic department is a pillar of the integrity of the institution. It makes us a “real university.”
While adding mens golf back will aid in that effort, the inept public handling of necessary and unnecessary cuts to the program has set the athletic department back decades and could have pigeon holed us back into a new Conference USA of marginal value. The University’s reputation, in some circles, was put back even farther and might never recover.
We need to be more vigilant and guard against the convenient decisions of the misguided.
