Written by Kyle Porter at CBS Sports.com
Two golfers competing in this year’s Women’s NCAA Golf Championship received two-stroke penalties in the team stroke play portion of the event for going to the bathroom. Northwestern’s Sarah Cho and Kent State’s Kelly Nielsen both erroneously took golf cart rides to the facilities during the middle of their rounds and were docked accordingly.
Here is Golfweek with the bizarre ruling.
The conditions of competition for the NCAA D-I Women’s Championship state that a player “must not ride on any form of transportation during a stipulated round unless authorized.”
A player taking a cart to go to the bathroom is not automatically “authorized.” So when Cho, who started her round on No. 10 at Rich Harvest Farms, drove herself to a bathroom coming off 18, that was illegal. The same for Nielsen when she had a Kent State staffer drive her to a bathroom coming off No. 13 green.
The penalty for this breach is two shots, administered on the following hole. Thus Cho’s double bogey on No. 1 was moved to a quadruple bogey with the two-stroke infraction, and Nielsen’s par at No. 14 was changed to a double bogey.
Nielsen’s penalty did not affect her team as her 79 wasn’t going to play anyway (teams take the low four of five scores). Cho’s Northwestern squad went on to win the team play portion of the tournament by eight anyway. So they would have won by 10. They still got the No. 1 seed for the match play portion.
And who did they see in the first round of match play but Kent State. And who do you think played against each other? That’s right, Cho beat Nielsen 5 and 4 to help the Wildcats move on to the semifinals.
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