The offseason is here, with all of Arizona’s sports done for 2024-25 season and the 2025-26 campaigns still a little ways away.
Which makes this a great time to step back and see how all of the Wildcats’ programs are doing and how they’ve handled the move from the Pac-12 to the Big 12
Over the next few weeks we’ll take a look at each of the UA’s men’s and women’s athletic programs to see what shape they’re in and what prospects they have for the near future. We’ll break down each team and evaluate how it is performing under its current coaching staff, looking at the state of the program before he/she arrived and comparing it to now while also evaluating how that program fits into its new conference.
Next up: Jim Anderson’s men’s golf team
How it looked before
Legendary coach Rick LaRose won a national title at Arizona in 1992, during a run of 21 consecutive appearances in the NCAA championships. But he only got that far twice in his final five years, retiring in 2012 after 34 seasons in Tucson.
The program turned to a first-time head coach in Anderson, who had spent five seasons as an assistant at Texas A&M before getting the UA job. He made regionals in his first year but then went four consecutive seasons without any postseason appearances, the NCAA championship drought extending to 10 years before breaking through in 2022.
Arizona won its regional that year and made nationals again in 2024, and in 2021 won the Pac-12 Tournament title.
Where things stand now
Anderson is the longest-tenured head coach at Arizona, heading into his 14th season, but the the 2024-25 campaign was disappointing. The Wildcats finished 12th out of 16 schools in their first Big 12 Tournament, more than 50 shots behind the champion, and at the Amherst Regional in Virginia they missed the cut for nationals by one stroke.
Individually, though, it wasn’t as bad. Filip Jakubcik earned Big 12 First Team honors, while Zach Pollo finished in the top 10 in the regional. Pollo then went on to qualify for the U.S. Open as an amateur, though he did not make the cut, while Jakubcik won the European Amateur in Sweden to qualify for the British Open.
Jakubcik and Pollo are set to return in 2025-26 while only Johnny Walker is graduating among the regulars. The Wildcats also signed a pair of recruits in November in California prospect Finn McCall and Swedish National Team member William Wistrand.
Big 12 vs. Pac-12
Golf is one of those sports where, until the conference tournament, the opponents you’re facing aren’t heavily aligned with your league. The UA played in a lot of the same events as it did as a member of the Pac-12.
The Big 12 Championship was held at Southern Hills in Tulsa, Okla., a course that has previously hosted the PGA Championship and U.S. Open. All 16 schools play men’s golf, so the field is deeper than in the Pac-12, particularly this past season when five Big 12 teams (ASU, BYU, Colorado, Oklahoma State and Texas Tech) made nationals and OSU won its 12th national title.
One big question
Can Arizona be a consistent national title contender? Arizona has qualified for the regional portion of the NCAA Tournament in six straight seasons (not counting the COVID-shortened 2019-20) and was so close to getting nationals for the third time in four seasons. But the key to going deep in the postseason is depth, and while the Wildcats have consistently had a top two or three its fourth and fifth scorers have been the difference.