Generally speaking, if you’re a high-level golfer playing your final stroke-play round of the week on Thursday morning, something has gone very wrong.
As anyone who’s teed it up in competition knows, if your final round in a competition arrives on a Thursday morning, that very 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 championships. And unless your team has a religious exemption precluding you from competing in Sunday’s final round.
That turns out to be the scene at this year’s NCAA golf national championship, where the BYU Cougars played their Sunday stroke play round on Thursday morning, hours before any other team had teed off to begin their national championship.
The story here begins with the schedule for this year’s national championship, which is being contested over six days at the Omni La Costa resort in Carlsbad, Calif. The way the competition works is fairly simple: individual competitors on the top 30 teams (plus six individual qualifiers) play in a 72-hole stroke play competition. The low scorer at the end of that competition is the NCAA individual champion, while the low eight teams advance into a bracket-style match play competition to determine the team champion.
The nature of this competition (and the complexity of the schedule) means the rounds will take place from Friday, May 29 through Wednesday, June 3. Assuming all goes according to plan, teams will play a competition round every single day.
That’s no issue for 29 of the teams in this year’s national championship field, but it is a big issue 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 sacred day of the week in the Mormon faith, a day in which practitioners are expected to worship and rest.
As such, BYU has made it so that its athletics programs only play in competitions on six days of the week, from Monday to Saturday, navigating schedules to ensure that all events occur on days other than the Sabbath.
For the golf team, that put this year’s national championship schedule in a bit of a pickle. Either the team would have to withdraw from the competition, refusing to play on the day of rest, or they would have to violate their religious obligations in order to compete in the national championship.
Instead, the team appealed to the NCAA for an exemption, seeking to play the additional stroke play round at another time and allowing the team to compete in the tournament. The NCAA complied, and so the Cougars went off early on Thursday morning to play their Sunday round at the national championship, alone, while the remainder of the field got ready for round 1.
By all accounts, things went pretty well on Thursday for BYU, which was ranked 22nd heading into the championship. The Cougars shot a team score of one under, which will be officially posted when the rest of the teams play their Sunday rounds. On Friday, playing with the rest of the field, BYU posted a team score of eight over par.
