In the upcoming academic year the Goshen College Golf Team will no longer be an active part of the athletic department. This news is due to the recent budget cuts throughout the school.
This difficult decision impacts Goshen College students Brian Charles, Alejandro Genis, sophomores, and Benjamin Pollitt, a junior, who were members of the team before the cut. Pollitt takes the decision much more personally in comparison to his teammates.Pollitt feels the decision is harder for him to take because they (Genis and Charles) haven’t been through the hardships with golf that he has while at Goshen.
“When I arrived we didn’t have a full team and I had a different coach then the one that recruited me,” says Pollitt.
It didn’t get much better for the England native from there. In the following years Pollitt welcomed several new teammates into the fray and “thoroughly enjoyed” his sophomore year and the fall of his junior year.
After asking Pollitt about why he feels the decision impacts him more than his teammates he replied, “It’s not that it literally affects me more, it’s just disappointing to find out that I no longer get to be a senior athlete; something I was looking forward to for a long time.”
Pollitt has aspirations of completing the PGA program outside of Goshen College; this qualification means he will be a qualified professional golfer. The decision to cut the golf team, Pollitt says, doesn’t directly impact his career path due to the fact that he wouldn’t be able to begin the process until the spring of his senior year.
Although Pollitt and his teammates already know about the decision, some future golfers do not. There were golfers that were recruited to play on the team at the beginning of the next school year. These students have already committed to attending Goshen College in the fall. Their reaction to not being able to play golf throughout their college years is still unknown.
While the athletic department looks to wrap up these loose ends, the program will indeed not continue after this year.
