Picture this. Kansas State men's golf lost its best and most-veteran golfers from a team that narrowly missed out on advancing to the program's first ever national championship by only three shots at the NCAA Bremerton Regional. Now these 2025-26 Wildcats, with nearly an entirely new roster, comes off a fall season in which they finished top five in four of five events, and their top five golfers combined for 10 top-20 finishes, seven top-10 finishes and two top-five finishes.
She's wearing a black Nike golf jacket, sitting in a cushy brown chair in the corner of Colbert's Restaurant at Colbert Hills Golf Course just after noon. She has both hands peeking out from the jacket's sleeves, giving two thumbs up, wearing a wide grin. This is the introduction to Kansas State sophomore Kelsey Chen, who grew up on a big island off the coast of China, and now has achieved her first big thing since her arrival in the Little Apple.
She's smiling as she talks. In 2023, Nastja Claessens, the daughter of Belgian basketball coach Fredric Claessens and former Belgian Cat Irina Medvedeva, became only the second player in Belgian women's basketball history to be voted Player of the Year and Rookie of the Year in the same season.
The young boy and his father waited in a long line that snaked around Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium just after sunlight kissed the asphalt on a crisp June morning in Omaha, Nebraska. This was the tradition for Mike Lodice and his son, Kyan, who lived minutes away, and who made the annual pilgrimage to the dusty mecca that began with hotdogs and sodas and ended with sunburn and memories — the College Baseball World Series. Yes, they had done this for years. Everyone in town waited three or four hours until the gates opened and then sprinted to the best seats in general admission. But on this particular day, after watching the fans in front of them slowly enter the gates and file into the stadium, Mike and Kyan, with a mile of people standing behind them, were stopped by a stadium attendant.
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