‘It’s absolutely devastating’: The careers of WSU spring seniors hang in the balance
The fate of 32 senior student-athletes playing spring sports at Wichita State will be decided Monday, when the NCAA Division I Council Committee votes to determine if they will be eligible to complete their final seasons next spring.
Will Jacob Katzfey and the four other baseball seniors get to finish what they started this spring under Eric Wedge? Will softball senior Madison Perrigan be able to finish her pursuit of the program’s all-time home run record? Will the All-American doubles team of Murkel Dellien and Marius Frosa have a final shot at nationals? Will reigning conference MVP Rebekah Topham get one last track meet to add to her accolades?
After the coronavirus pandemic prematurely ended what was supposed to be their final seasons this spring, those senior student-athletes and their coaches wait nervously for Monday’s results.
“It’s been devastating. I’m still grieving today. I’ve been thinking about it daily and I’m thinking about how badly I feel for those seniors,” WSU track and field coach Steve Rainbolt said. “I know these are wonderful young people that are going to have wonderful, productive lives and I know they’re going to survive this, but right now for them and for me, it’s absolutely devastating.”
The promising news is that the NCAA Division I Council Committee has already recommended that eligibility relief should be provided to student-athletes in every class who participate in spring sports. WSU offers eight spring sports: baseball, men’s and women’s golf, softball, men’s and women’s tennis and men’s and women’s track and field.
But WSU coaches are curious about the details of such an arrangement.
On the women’s tennis team, five of eight scholarship players are seniors, with all five expressing interest to coach Colin Foster that they want to return, if possible, to compete again next spring. But Foster has been recruiting under the assumption he was going to need to replace those five spots and already has two incoming recruits signed.
“It’s going to be interesting to see how the NCAA legislates it all,” Foster said. “Are those seniors going to be exempt and not count against our scholarship limit? And then if you do that and I fill all of my spots, then no one is going to have any spots left for the 2021 recruiting class. So it’s going to put those recruits in a tough spot.”
Another obstacle is finding a way to keep all of the seniors academically eligible for another school year. After talking to all of the WSU spring coaches, it seems like the majority of their seniors were planning on returning to WSU next school year anyway, whether to finish up their undergraduate degree or start graduate school.
The real dilemmas are for the seniors who are graduating in May and were not planning on more school. Will they be forced to declare another major and start another undergraduate degree or pursue a master’s degree?
And there are seniors like track and field’s Mason Buckmaster, a seven-foot high jumper and reigning American Athletic Conference champion, who are graduating this May and already had plans lined up for life after their athletic careers were supposed to conclude this spring.
“Mason was jumping better than ever before and he was looking to have a huge spring season for us,” Rainbolt said. “But he’s got a very nice job as an engineer already lined up in Fort Worth that he starts in July. So he’s not going to be able to compete anymore, at least not for Wichita State.”
But for many, the motivation to complete their final season of their collegiate career will lead them back to WSU next spring if the NCAA allows them to compete again. That’s certainly the case for Dellien and Frosa, the All-American doubles team on the men’s tennis team.
“If it ends up where they’re done and that was how it ended, it would be a pretty disappointing way for it to finish,” WSU men’s tennis coach Danny Bryan said. “They were just starting to get going again. If they could have kept that momentum, they were going to get a chance to make a run at the NCAA’s again.
“So if they get another year, it would be incredible. I think they learned a lot from this season already, so if they get to come back next year then it will be great to see.”
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