photo by: Mike Yoder

Head Kansas golf coach Jamie Bermel is pictured Tuesday, May 22, 2018.

Kansas golfers Andy Spencer and Drew Shepherd are both slated to graduate in May. They’ve been teammates and roommates for the past four years.

And now that the NCAA has granted spring sports athletes an extra season of eligibility, they’re both facing unexpected decisions about whether to play another year of college golf or move on with their lives.

It’s a decision that could have implications not only on the golfers’ futures, but on the team’s recruiting. And Spencer says both of the options are appealing.

“I wish it was easy,” he said. “I would’ve made a decision by now, but what it really comes down to is, in five years, am I going to be more disappointed that I went pro or more disappointed that I didn’t go back to school?”

Spencer has already gone through Q School for the Korn Ferry Tour, and he knows a professional future is out there.

But because the entire sports world has stopped and golfers at all levels will be eager to sign up for tournaments when play resumes, Spencer’s biggest question about his future is whether leaving Kansas will leave him without somewhere to play.

“I have most of the information I need, if not all of it, to make a decision,” Spencer said. “I just don’t want to turn pro now and have nowhere to play until Q School next fall.”

“We keep getting new information every day,” Shepherd added. “So I’m going to wait for Coach (Jamie) Bermel to give me all the information possible before making a decision either way.”

Bermel told the Journal-World on Tuesday that he had no timeline for when either of his seniors needed to make a decision. He also said the rest of the team was fully behind the idea of Spencer and Shepherd returning.

“We have a team text thread,” Bermel said. “And as soon as the story broke that they all get another year, you saw texts that said, ‘Come on back!’ They want them both back and they want to continue this thing. College golf is, in a lot of ways, the time of your life. It’s a pretty good gig.”

Spencer has found the support from his teammates to be helpful as he weighs his options.

“To be able to know I can play with those guys is really comforting,” Spencer said. “When we were coming back from Bandon Dunes (Ore.) before everything was officially canceled, I was kind of thinking it might’ve been the last time I put a Jayhawk on, and it kind of hit me. I don’t know if I want to go out like that. There’s just a lot to think about at this point.”

Spencer said he hoped to make a decision about his future by May so he could set his summer schedule one way or the other.

Turning pro would mean practice schedules, lining up events and figuring out where he was going to live. But returning to KU would mean deciding what he wanted to pursue in graduate school.

While the seniors are evaluating their options for the future, Bermel is grappling with some big questions of his own on the recruiting front.

There are so many roster-related calculations to do, in fact, that he needed to run to his office on campus on Friday to get some better equipment for the job.

“I’ve figured it a million different ways, and I was tired of crunching numbers on my phone, so I needed my big calculator,” Bermel said.

Most years, Bermel’s roster is made up of 12 golfers, and his recruiting plans as far as two or three years down the road are built around that number.

But if Shepherd and Spencer return, KU would enter next season with 14 golfers on scholarship.

Bermel said he’s rooting for the two golfers to return, but he realizes it’s not an easy decision.

“Both of them asked me what I thought,” Bermel said. “And I said to both of them, ‘First of all, you’re asking the wrong guy because of course I want you to come back.’ You’re seniors, you’re great teammates, you’ve played a lot and you bring a lot of things to the team.’ But there’s really no right or wrong decision.

“I just made sure to let them know that pro golf is always going to be there. College is not. So if they want to come back and experience this for one more year and be on a team for one more year, they should do it.”