NCAA Cancels Women’s Golf Regional in Baton Rouge, LA

The Purdue women qualified for the NCAA Regional in Baton Rouge and received the #11 seed. Purdue would have had their work cut out for them to advance to the NCAA Championship as only the top six teams advance, but ya know what? That’s why they play! We don’t know who the best six teams are going to be on any given day so Purdue had as good a shot as anyone else. Remember, the Purdue women’s golf team has a pretty good recent history including winning the team title in 2010. Unfortunately, it was not to be.

Before one single ball had been teed up the NCAA Committee representative and Farleigh Dickinson AD Brad Hurlbut came down those stairs and announced that while the course was “playable” it wasn’t playable at a “championship level”. What this means is not clear to me and it clearly wasn’t clear to the women in the video above. These players had their 2020 tournament cancelled due to Covid-19 and now the opportunity for so many of these players was taken away because of...rain? Imagine! You’ve worked an entire season to get to this point and you know it’s going to be difficult to make the next step but you’ve been playing well when suddenly it’s all over for the second year in a row without you even getting a chance to play a single hole.

The NCAA screwed this up yet again. According to a report from Golf Week Purdue senior golfer Inez Wanamarta could be heard asking, “[w]hat is championship condition?” This is yet another example of the NCAA not only screwing up an event entirely but it comes on the heels of the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament weight room debacle. Sara Byrne, a golfer for Miami, even shared news that the LSU men’s golf team was out on the course playing. Her twitter feed is a gold mine showing the hypocrisy of the NCAA and their failure to plan for this eventuality.

She goes on to note that earlier in the day the coaches were out walking the course to determine the conditions. Images of the “unplayable” course were shown and look, I’m no Arnold Palmer but this looks playable to me.

And yes, I understand that there’s only so much you can see from a picture. I get that. I can’t see if the ground is so soggy that if you step on it you sink, I don’t know how the ball would play on the course, but the context clues tell me that people are playing the course, including the LSU men’s team, so that it can’t be too terribly bad. If it truly was not playable I doubt LSU would take the time to get the practice in.

This is yet another slap in the face to the women’s athletes that play under the umbrella of the NCAA an organization proud to pump its chest out about Title IX and helping women but that also doesn’t have to comply with Title IX itself and shows it all the time by how they treat the female athletes.

So just like that Purdue’s season is over. With this decision to cancel the regional the top six seeded teams and an additional top three seeded individuals who are not on the top six seeded teams advance. Unfortunately for Purdue they were not among those teams and had no opportunity to prove themselves.

The ineptitude of the NCAA knows no bounds and it’s now cost multiple teams their shot at a title. They should be ashamed.