Generally speaking, if you are a high-level golfer who plays your last round of stroke play of the week on Thursday morning, something has gone terribly wrong.
As anyone who has put it in competition knows, if your final round in a competition arrives on Thursday morning, LOT likely means you’re headed for a WD, or worse, a DQ.
Unless, of course, you’re playing in this year’s college golf national championship. And unless your team has a religious exemption that prevents you from competing in Sunday’s final round.
That turns out to be the scene at this year’s NCAA National Golf Championship, where the BYU Cougars played their own on sunday kick round play on Thursday morning, several hours before any other teams had set off START their national championship.
The story here begins with the schedule for this year’s national championship, which is being contested over six days in Omni La Costa resort in Carlsbad, California The way the competition works is fairly simple: individual competitors in the top 30 teams (plus six individual qualifiers) play in a 72-hole stroke play competition. The lowest scorer at the end of that competition is the NCAA individual champion, while the bottom eight teams advance to a bracket-style matchup to determine the team champion.
The nature of this competition (and the complexity of the schedule) means that the rounds will take place from Friday 29th May to Wednesday 3rd June. Assuming all goes according to plan, teams will play one round of competition each day.
That’s not a problem for 29 of the teams in this year’s national championship field, but it is one big case for one of them: BYU. The Cougs are from an overwhelmingly Mormon university (more than 98 percent of the student body), and Sunday is a holy day of the week in the Mormon faith, a day on which practitioners are expected to worship and rest.
As such, BYU has made it so that its athletics programs only play in contests six days a week, Monday through Saturday, navigating schedules to ensure that all events occur on days other than the Sabbath.
For the golf team, which put this year’s national championship schedule in a pickle. Either the team would withdraw from the competition, refusing to play on the day off, or they would have to violate religious obligations to compete in the national championship.
Instead, the team appealed to the NCAA for an exemption, seeking to play the extra round of stroke play at a different time and allowing the team to compete in the tournament. The NCAA agreed, and so the Cougars left early Thursday morning to play their own on sunday round in the national championship, alone, while the rest of the field got ready for the first round.
By all accounts, things went pretty well Thursday for BYU, which was ranked 22nd going into the championship. The Cougars posted a team score of one under, which will be officially released when the rest of the teams play their rounds on Sunday. On Friday, playing the rest of the field, BYU posted a team score of eight over par.
