It’s been a little more than a year now since WVU’s exhumed golf program hired a coach, and Shawn Kovich is itching to get started in the fall. The Mountaineers make their return/debut at the Missouri Tiger Turningstone Invitational on Sept. 6-7.

“There’s been so much to figure out,” he said. “Like where you’re going to practice, who is going to be here playing. I really didn’t have a game plan to get transfers in here, but it just worked out to get some seniors, juniors, sophomores and freshmen. That was my goal, to not have eight or nine freshmen that first year.”

The roster is taking shape. He has players from neighboring states Pennsylvania and Ohio, and of course he is mining the Mountain State for talent. He is looking abroad, and players from Canada, Korea and Australia are in the fold.

“I searched under any and every rock,” Covich said.

The hometowns of Covich’s first two waves of recruits cannot be overlooked. The Morgantown climate is a hurdle he must clear in wooing golfers who want to play year-round. Golfers from West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Canada developed their games in spite of that.

“I’ve been focusing on Canada because we are warmer to them,” Covich said. “We’ve had success with that … hopefully we can kind of get a pipeline going there. I’ve got players from Ohio and Pennsylvania because they understand the region and the temperature and they’ve gotten good even though they’ve been up north.

“They’re not scared of it.”

This is extraordinarily interesting, of course. I have no idea what to expect from a competitive sense. It’s not like starting a football or basketball program, where teams need years and years to fill out rosters and build and develop facilities. This seems easier. With those two sports serving as the (wrong) comparisons, consider that there are a lot of scholarship opportunities and a lot of programs out there. There’s enormous competition for players. With golf, there aren’t so many opportunities, but there are players both here and apparently also abroad. Certainly there is competition for talent, but there are ways to find talent and thus win in a sport that isn’t as imposing as football and basketball. And unlike baseball, northern schools can win in college golf,  sometimes because those northern schools play so much in other places.

But having said that, consider that WVU can (and will) have a hat on the table, so to speak, when a very good player has to make a decision. I wonder when and how often a player takes a risk and opts for the project over the security of a known program. How long until WVU is a known program and not a project? What does it take to change that perception? WVU has disadvantages with which to deal. There are courses around here, courses that are good enough to wow recruits, but there is no home course. How does the team’s top player get used to all of this?

Again, the whole thing is fascinating and it’s probably unfair to predict ups and downs except to say we can expect both.