Pete Kuhl, a senior on the University of Wisconsin men’s golf team, plans to find closure in Madison, Wisconsin, next fall despite the fact that he’s not likely to tee it up competitively for the Badgers again.
Kuhl’s season ended March 10 with a four-footer for par at the Dunes Club in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. A final-round 75 at the General Hackler Championship will stand as his last round as a college golfer.
Ever since the NCAA called off the rest of the spring season on March 12 – then came back the next day and indicated it would grant an eligibility extension for student-athletes robbed of the spring championship season – Kuhl has made it a point to keep himself apprised of where things stand. Head coach Michael Burcin has done the same.
“I think I called him that night, texted his parents,” Burcin said of the day the NCAA made its eligibility announcement, “and just said I don’t know much but as we do find out things, I’m going to stay in touch with him.”
The NCAA ultimately left it up to individual institutions to decide how to fund extra eligibility for spring athletes whose careers came to an abrupt end in March when college sports shut down to help stop the spread of the coronavirus. On Thursday, the University of Wisconsin made the first move. Athletics director Barry Alvarez said the university will not allow student-athletes in their senior years to regain that lost eligibility and return for the 2020-21 academic year.
“What we tried to do was encourage our seniors to go ahead and, if you’re going to graduate, graduate and move on with your life,” Alvarez said. “We appreciate everything that you’ve done. But move forward. The future is in question, and we can’t promise you anything.”
His comments came on Wednesday during an appearance on a Madison radio network. The Badgers’ football coach from 1990-2005, and twice an interim coach for bowl games in 2012 and 2014, Alvarez owns the school record for career wins and has been the athletics director since 2004.
In a statement issued on Thursday, the university’s athletics department said it would “do everything possible to support” those seniors who have yet to complete their undergraduate degrees during “a time of unprecedented uncertainty in college athletics.”
Who’s ponying up? NCAA eligibility extension comes with questions
This is not world-ending news for Kuhl. He already has an internship lined up for the summer at M3 Insurance. He’ll begin work in the Madison office on May 26 (provided stay-at-home orders have let up by then). Kuhl is a personal finance major with one three-hour class lined up for the summer and another seven credit hours left after that to complete his degree.
He’ll be back on campus this fall, but had never planned to tee it up just for the first half of the season. In Kuhl’s mind, fall is the time to test lineups and build momentum. It wouldn’t do the team any good for him to leave at semester. Plus, a summer internship will leave less time for golf. He’s not sure how sharp he’d be come August.
It still stings a little that the University forced his hand.
“I would say I personally, I made sure that I knew kind of what I was going to do based on every option that the NCAA and the university was going to grant me,” Kuhl said on Thursday. “I went through and thought about everything.
“I would be lying if I said I was a little disappointed I didn’t get the opportunity to make the decision by myself.”
Kuhl is the lone senior on Wisconsin’s squad. He and redshirt senior Tess Hackworthy on the women’s team are among roughly 35 seniors across Wisconsin’s 10 spring-season sports impacted by the university’s decision.
For Kuhl, closure will likely come in the form of a volunteer assistant position, or something even less formal – just hanging around the practice facilities for one last hurrah with his coach and teammates.
“These kids in Pete’s situation, there’s some certainty and he knows he had an internship and he knows that that could lead to a job, those things are certain,” Burcin said. “He knows those things are going to happen.”
Competitive golf on any level in 2020 – even the fall college season – seems much less certain right now than that. Burcin thinks that Kuhl’s situation probably mirrors the position that many seniors find themselves in: certainty ahead but not behind.
Like many athletics departments, even those in conferences such as the Big Ten with healthy streams of television revenue, Wisconsin is projecting at least a $4 million shortfall in revenue as a result of cancellations caused by COVID-19. Most costly was the cancellation of the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments.
University athletics departments could find themselves under considerably more strain if the upcoming college football season, which is expected to begin in earnest on the first Saturday of September, is postponed or canceled. Ticket sales and TV deals account for a significant part of Wisconsin’s athletics budget.
“Those are things that we’ve got to be prepared for, be proactive in our thinking,” Alvarez said.
Paul Myerberg, USA Today, contributed reporting.
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