Walker Gantt got the call on Halloween.
Gantt, a student at Greenbrier High in Evans, Ga., had made a verbal commitment to play golf at nearby Augusta University for more than five months. But now, just weeks after making that decision official during the NCAA’s early signing period for the Class of 2025, he was listening to Jaguars head coach Steven Paine on the other line deliver the unfortunate news :
Due to impending roster limits imposed by the NCAA, Paine no longer had room for Gantt the next fall, and Gantt was in the process of being decommitted.
“It was a huge surprise,” Gantt said. “The next few days were brutal for me, I’m not going to lie. I was panicking. I wanted to have a place. I was heartbroken to have the opportunity to play college golf taken away.
Gantt’s story isn’t unique, though — not this year, nor in the midst of this unprecedented signing period.
Last month, the U.S. District Court of Northern California granted preliminary approval to the pending House v. California settlement. $2.78 billion NCAA award which, if finalized, would notably pave the way for schools to directly compensate their student-athletes through a revenue-sharing model while also removing scholarship limitations in all Division sports I. This is good news, at least for players. The bad news is that the NCAA, as part of this agreement, also plans to impose roster limits in every sport by next fall, a move that will see thousands of DI playing opportunities disappear , the class of 2025 experiencing the first crop of victims. – actors, like Gantt, whose verbal commitments were revoked at the eleventh hour.
The balloons, the cakes, all that team gear? I hope Mom and Dad kept the receipts.
Men’s and women’s golf stand to lose hundreds of spots on the current roster once those sports’ programs begin operating with a maximum of nine players — or, at least in some cases, fewer. The Southeastern Conference recently told its golf coaches that it would limit its roster to eight players, amid serious rumors that other schools would go below that number to meet Title IX requirements.
While some golf programs, particularly on the women’s side, already offer small teams, others do not. Oregon currently has a 15-player team, only three of which are seniors. Oklahoma, the fourth-ranked team in the country, has just three seniors on 13 players — and three rookies are expected to sign this week. The list is long.
So, what should these coaches do, who were faced with this harsh reality last May? NCAA rules (the few remaining) prohibit coaches from commenting on prospective student-athletes, so coaches contacted by GolfChannel.com were unable to provide details. Several coaches preferred not to comment because they had not yet made any decision. Others suggested their cuts would likely come from their existing rosters, but not until this season. A few, however, confirmed that difficult choices had already been made.
“I was told an hour ago that I could only recruit one kid, and I committed to two over a year ago,” Power-4 women’s coach said . “Imagine making that phone call. Heartbreaking. The situation we unfortunately find ourselves in.
Added a Power-4 men’s coach who had to cut his own recruit: “Worst week of my coaching career.” »
At least four SEC men’s programs have informed prospective student-athletes that they will no longer be able to honor their commitments due to roster constraints. That list includes Florida, which had to rescind its offer to Lorenzo Rodriguez, an individual high school state champion out of Miami’s Belen Jesuit; the Gators will sign three more players this week, including junior All-American Trevor Gutschewski, while Rodriguez has been flooded with interest from coaches with roster space. Rodriguez will surely soon join other recruits who have landed in new homes, like Ethan Lien of Cupertino, Calif., whose offer was withdrawn by new Cal coach Michael Wilson this summer but announced Tuesday that he had committed to UC San Diego, which plays in the Big West Conference.
“The last few months have been tough,” Lien said, “but it’s taught me to come back even stronger and face adversity head on.”
Mitchell Maier of Richmond, Texas, who thought he was headed to Texas A&M a few weeks ago, also revealed Tuesday that he would sign after all, just with North Texas out of the American Athletic Conference.
“I plan to come back stronger than before,” Maier said.
It’s also possible that while coaches aren’t planning to break bad news to their new recruits at this time, provisions written into some aid agreements – which replaced the recently scrapped National Letter of Intent (NLI) – would allow schools to terminate these agreements. contracts to comply with any regulation-related mandates (i.e., list limits). Currently, NLIs require student-athletes and institutions to honor their agreements for one academic year, with some exceptions, although new aid agreements provide more flexibility, particularly for student-athletes.
“There will be kids who sign next week and never step foot on campus,” predicted one Power-4 women’s coach.
How each golf program will be affected by the entire NCAA rulebook is still uncertain, but an early consensus is that the mid-majors could benefit, at least in terms of talent, from this new era of spinoff recruiting. . One mid-level coach said he already had a list of five or six guys who had been told they would be cut or had their offers withdrawn by Power-4 programs. Others are keeping spots open when the transfer portal explodes with rejects on April 16.
“These top schools have been drafting guys off our rosters for years,” another mid-level coach said. “It’s funny how things have changed now.”
The coaches also agree that, in many cases, players could find themselves in better situations where they would receive more playing time instead of being buried on the depth chart.
When Augusta withdrew its offer, Gantt immediately began researching other schools he had considered during his initial recruitment. He narrowed his list down to programs he thought might be a good fit for him, then he started calling those coaches, one by one. It didn’t take long for Kennesaw State head coach Bryant Odom, a friend of Gantt’s father who had courted Gantt hard, to snap up Gantt.
“It was my first phone call when we could start talking to the coaches, my first official visit, my first offer, and he never hesitated,” Gantt said of Odom, whose Owls are currently ranked No. 48 in the country (Augusta is No. 1). .112). “He always believed in me and my abilities. … Since it’s so late in the game and knowing that all of these teams are dealing with the same things, when Kennesaw said they had an open spot, I knew I had to jump on it.
The second Gantt door has opened, but in this rapidly changing NCAA landscape, surely not everyone will be so lucky.
