Two days after Kaleb Smith learned his Akron men’s golf team was being eliminated, the part that still didn’t register was that all the guys wouldn’t be in the same place next year.
“It hasn’t sunk in as far as a teammate perspective,” Smith said, a redshirt junior. “I’m thinking they’re all going to be in Akron but no, they’re all going to be separated.”
At Akron, men’s golf was one of three sports that fell victim to budget cuts. Head coach David Trainor was informed over the phone early in the day on Thursday, May 14. Minutes later, he had to get on a team Zoom call to let his players know.
“It was awful,” Trainor said. “Thursday was a day of a lot of tears, and it went all day long.”
The bigger picture in all the uncertainty that NCAA athletics now faces is one of displacement. In Akron, it’s a team broken up, a committed coach left jobless and a graduate left in limbo. Smith felt the blow two times. In addition to his program being gone, a career opportunity evaporated, too.
Smith, a marketing major from Mansfield, Ohio, had a pending offer that was frozen when the company had to make staff cuts and other reductions in light of the coronavirus.
“It was a lesson learned, for lack of better terms, don’t ever put all your eggs in one basket,” he said. The job search resumes for the fresh graduate.
Trainor was once told by a coaching mentor to only recruit players you’d want as a neighbor – players who will represent you with class and integrity. Trainor is finding now that it’s easy to go to battle for those kinds of men. Smith, for example, asked Trainor for a letter of recommendation, and the words poured onto the page.
“It was just an easy thing to write,” Trainor said.
All six Akron underclassmen will potentially hit what’s already a loaded transfer portal, and Trainor had some specific instructions for that: Cast a wide net, find a spot where you can actually play and a place that aligns with your needs academically. Produce a list, Trainor told his players, and “I’ll call anyone, anywhere for you.”
Smith and his roommate Mitchell McFarland wonder sometimes if their names will come up if and when Akron ever reboots the program. If they do, hopefully the stories told do these big personalities justice. Smith was the guy most likely to make you laugh in the pre-round driving range huddle. He had a knack for that.
In the team photo that circulated with news of Akron’s program being cut, the whole team is wearing golf shoes but Smith, who appears in house slippers. McFarland is quick to point that out.
“We always said we just were too serious,” McFarland said on the importance of Smith’s comedic relief, “and that’s maybe one of the reasons we don’t play up to how we feel like we should.”
McFarland said Smith took it upon himself to keep the atmosphere from ever getting too stuffy. Not even Smith’s presence could cut the somber mood of last week’s call about Akron’s program being eliminated, though.
“You don’t really realize the gravity of the situation when it’s happening in real time,” McFarland said. “As time has gone on, the downstream effects are becoming more prevalent.”
McFarland thinks it would be an impossible situation to have one or two years of true eligibility left and be faced with the decision to stay or transfer. The senior, however, has a job lined up as a field operative in Scioto (Ohio) County for President Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign, so there’s somewhere to go from here. Given that, he never seriously considered taking up the NCAA on an extra eligibility offer extended in light of the coronavirus.
Besides, Trainor had put things in golf industry terms: Most college graduates enter the real world as an assistant to a local representative, setting up demo days.
“You’re now Scotty Cameron’s tour rep,” he said. “You have to go.”
McFarland will remember Trainor as the kind of guy who was passionate about everything, from golf to politics. He knew when to be hands on and when to just let a guy play. He never pushed for a major swing overhaul, but rather liked to see the little things done right. Course management was a popular topic.
“I think that’s what a good college golf coach does,” McFarland said.
Akron’s men’s golf team is not the first coronavirus casualty, and it’s unlikely to be the last. Both the men’s and women’s teams were slated for elimination at St. Edward’s University, an NCAA Division II school in Austin, Texas, but fought back with an attempt at fundraising that still has them in limbo.
Trainor wondered if fundraising might be a possibility at Akron. He spent several coffee-fueled early-morning hours leading up to the fateful phone call with his athletic director jotting down thoughts and questions, and that was a big one. Ultimately, he wasn’t given the option.
“I would have loved the opportunity to try it,” he said. “If they had thrown a number at me and said raise this, I’d have been like alright, here comes my crowning achievement.”
Trainor has poured energy into this program for the past nine years. Akron was his first head coaching gig, and once there, he didn’t scour job openings. The Berwyn, Pennsylvania, native made Akron home, and there are maybe no better words to explain his mark on the program than simply that he stayed.
“This was my program,” Trainor said, “and one of the things I told our donors, I told supporters, I told kids when I was recruiting them, Herb Page at Kent State built an unbelievable program in Northeast Ohio. He has proven that it can be done, which means that I am going to try my darndest to build an equally as good program as Coach Page did.”
Akron won its own Firestone Invitational for the first time in 2018 under Trainor. During his tenure, two players qualified for three NCAA regional tournaments. In 2016, George Baylis became Akron’s first individual MAC champion.
Akron is home to Firestone Country Club, one of Ohio’s best and for all but one year from 1999 to 2019, host of the PGA Tour’s WGC-Bridgestone Invitational. Every school has its draw (hello, warm climates and SEC football), and Firestone was that for Akron.
Trainor’s relationships in the golf community went just as deep as the ones he maintained with his players, and for that reason, under his lead, the Zips legacy became more about people than a place.
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