Arizona’s Bianca Pagdanganan watches her tee shot during the final round of the NCAA Division I Women’s Golf Championships in Stillwater, Okla., Wednesday, May 23, 2018.
Since winning the national championship a year ago in Oklahoma, Arizona’s women’s golf team has climbed to its highest position in the golfstat.com rankings, No. 4, as it prepares for the 2019 NCAA championships in Fayetteville, Arkansas, beginning Friday.
Coach Laura Ianello’s club is loaded, brimming with elite golfers Haley Moore, Bianca Pagdanganan, Sandra Nordaas and Yu-Sang Hou — all clutch performers in their remarkable 2018 comeback victory.
To fully understand how difficult it will be for Arizona to repeat, imagine entering the college football playoffs against Clemson, Alabama, Ohio State, USC and Florida State and LSU.
To add to the difficulty, Arizona will be playing on 10th-ranked Arkansas’ home course, the Blessings Golf Club, which is 4½ miles from the Razorbacks’ campus.
It’s that same sort of home-course advantage that played into Oregon winning the 2016 NCAA men’s championship in Eugene, Oregon, and Oklahoma State’s men’s team winning the 2018 title on its home course in Stillwater, Oklahoma?
It doesn’t seem fair, and it isn’t.
Ianello told me it’s a “huge advantage” for Arkansas, which she considers a top-five team. “But with advantage can come expectation,” she said.
The NCAA has finally acted to end golf’s home-course advantages but it doesn’t kick in until the 2020 men’s and women’s championships at Scottsdale’s Grayhawk Golf Club.
In abolishing home-course advantages, the NCAA ruled that players and coaches can no longer play — nor even walk/scout — the championship facility in the calendar year before the event. If a college golfer plays a round at Grayhawk before next year’s championships in Scottsdale, they will be disqualified and their team will not be able to replace them.
Arizona has won three women’s NCAA golf championships: in 1996 at the Bel Air Country Club in Los Angeles, in 2000 at the Sunriver course in Bend, Oregon, and last year in Oklahoma.
The next three men’s and women’s NCAA championships will be held at Grayhawk, which means the nearby Arizona State Sun Devils will be forbidden from playing there.
Now the question becomes whether Ianello’s Wildcats, ranked behind USC, Texas and Duke, can learn enough about the Blessings course in two practice rounds to challenge for the school’s fourth national title.
