Sager and two of her classmates will return for a fifth season at Seton Hall

   The final college tournament I posted in March when the season came to a sudden end, the impact of the coronavirus landing with a thud, was the UNF Challenge, hosted by the North Florida women’s team at Jacksonville Golf & Country Club.

   At the time, I lamented what appeared to be the end of the careers of some of the Seton Hall seniors after a runnerup finish by the Pirates. They had been building momentum toward the Big East Championship and the crown they hoped would cap their college careers.

   I had followed the Seton Hall program because several of its top players came out of the District One and Pennsylvania scholastic scene that I had covered at the Delaware County Daily Times and have continued to follow on T Mac Tees Off.

   Chief among them was Maddie Sager, who was the runnerup in the 2015 PIAA Class AAA Championship as a senior at Owen J. Roberts. Sager was joined at the Hall by Sammie Staudt, a four-time PIAA Class AAA qualifier during an outstanding scholastic career at Coatesville.

   The following year, Seton Hall’s new coach Natalie Desjardins plucked another top recruit out of Pennsylvania when Mia Kness, whom I had watched win the 2016 PIAA Class AAA Championship as a senior at Peters Township, joined the program.

   The good news is that Sager and two of her classmates at Seton Hall, Lizzie Win of Sylvania, Ohio and Carolina Ronchel Salas of Spain, will be back with the Pirates for the wraparound 2020-2021 season.

Not long after college athletics shut down in March, the NCAA announced that athletes who lost their senior seasons to the coronavirus pandemic would be offered an extra year of eligibility.

   Sager’s dad, Ed, who has kept me up to date on the Seton Hall program throughout his daughter’s time there, alerted me to the fact that Maddie Sager would be returning to Seton Hall to begin her work toward an MBA and play a fifth year.

   When the Seton Hall website published its 2020-’21 women’s golf roster, it became official. Sager, Win and Ronchel Salas will all return for a fifth year. With Kness back for her senior season, that dream of a Big East title and the accompanying invitation to an NCAA regional is alive for a lot of the group that was devastated to receive the news that the 2019-’20 season was over in mid-March.

   It will be interesting to see how many players, in programs big, small and in between make the decision to come back for a fifth year. A lot of players with professional aspirations will probably just get on with it.

   Some of the Class of 2020 might already have jobs lined up in their chosen professions and coming back for post-graduate work doesn’t make sense. This is hardly a news flash, but college is pretty   expensive these days and post-graduate work might not be in the budget.

   It doesn’t appear Staudt will be back, but you can be sure she’ll be rooting on her Pirates from afar and her former teammates will be giving her updates.

   Ed Sager also reached out because Maddie Sager got back on the golf course in a competitive situation last week, teeing it up in the South Carolina Women’s Amateur Championship, staged by the Women’s South Carolina Golf Association (WSCGA) at Columbia Country Club’s Ridgewood/Tall Pines Course.

   After struggling a little in the first two rounds, carding rounds of 76 and  77 over the par-72 Ridgewood/Tall Pines Course, Sager, playing out of RiverTowne Country Club near Charleston, shook the rust off and finished up strong with a 1-under 71 in Wednesday’s final round that enabled her to finish alone in 12^th place in the Championship Division with an 8-over 224 total.

   Sager’s steady final round featured 17 pars and a birdie at the par-3 eighth hole.

   Anna Morgan, coming off a solid freshman season at Furman, captured the title by defeating Savannah Hylton on the second hole of a playoff.

   Morgan, playing out of the Country Club of Spartanburg, bettered par in each of her first two rounds, a 1-under 71 in the opening round followed by a 2-under 70. She struggled a little in the final round with a 3-over 75 that enabled Hylton, playing out of the Golf Club at Indigo Run, to catch her with a final-round 72 that left them deadlocked at even-par 216.

   A quick check of the Furman women’s golf team's Twitter feed revealed that it was the second win in as many weeks for Morgan, who captured a victory in the Carolinas Women’s Amateur Championship at Bermuda Run Country Club’s East Course in Advance, N.C. a week earlier.

   Looks like Furman has a solid replacement for Morgan’s fellow Spartanburg native, Natalie Srinivasan, who became the first Paladin to receive the Annika Award as the top player in Division I women’s golf in the wraparound 2019-’20 season.

   As we have learned, there are no guarantees of anything in 2020, so it’s entirely possible that the fall portion of the 2020-’21 college golf season may get off to a spotty start, if it ever gets going at all. Golf, though, does seem to have an advantage over many sports when it comes to incorporating social distancing and CDC guidelines into the mix.

   But you’d like to think we’ll have this nasty virus under control by early in 2021 and Sager and her pals at Seton Hall will get the opportunity to play in that Big East Championship they were denied this spring.