WINTER GARDEN, Fla. – Several of the golf bags that were carted back and forth across the Orange County National driving range on Wednesday lacked the logos, sponsorship patches and embroidered names that are typical of a professional event.
Stand bags gave way to bags of a more practical weight. Qualifying School, on any tour, is about setting yourself up for the next season, and it doesn’t really matter what you look like doing it.
More than 150 players will tee it up at Orange County National’s two courses – Panther Lakes and Crooked Cat – this week in the final stage of Korn Ferry Tour Q-School. A player’s position relative to the top of the leaderboard determines the number of guaranteed starts he will receive on the developmental tour in the 2020 season. The medalist (and ties) will be fully exempt for the entire regular season. Players who finish Nos. 2-10 on the leaderboard will be exempt into the first 12 events while Nos. 11-40 are exempt into the first eight events. Both of those groups are subject to the reshuffles that occur in four-event intervals.
Winning this event isn’t necessarily a guarantor of future success, however. In the past six years of this particular qualifying format, no player who won the final stage of Q-School has been able to turn that into a PGA Tour card.
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Danny Walker, last year’s winner, is back at the final stage this year, approaching it the same way he did last December in Arizona after a year of learning the ropes. That is to say, he’s trying to win.
“Obviously, in a lot of ways you don’t want to be here,” he said. “In some ways it could have been a lot worse because I didn’t have to go back to first stage.”
One of the most pressure-packed weeks in golf.
Final Stage of Q-School begins Thursday. 👀 pic.twitter.com/j3SEO4cnaP
— Korn Ferry Tour (@KornFerryTour) December 11, 2019
Walker, a 24-year-old who turned pro in 2018 after a college career at Virginia, cites learning how to travel and build his schedule as one of the steepest learning curves from a year in which he made the cut in nine of 22 Korn Ferry Tour starts. In retrospect, he thinks he could have scheduled a couple more weeks off here or there.
“It just kind of wears on you,” he said of life on the road.
There was a certain confidence that came from Walker’s Q-School win, even though the story line didn’t ultimately play out the way he had hoped. He has worked on his driving and putting as he prepares for another shot at this tournament.
Still, there’s really no right way to prepare for the final stage of Q-School. Part of that has to do with the diversity of resumes among a 154-man field.
Daniel Wetterich is among a group of players who has risen all the way from the pre-qualifying stage back in August.
“When I was at pre-qualifying, honestly that was the most nervous I ever was throughout all the stages because I’m like, ‘I’m going to be doing this for a living.’”
Korn Ferry final stage is about improving status as opposed to avoiding elimination, but Wetterich, a recent Ohio State graduate, has viewed every step as being the same – particularly after getting over that initial hump. He won the Lincoln, Nebraska, pre-qualifier by two shots.
Wetterich turned professional right after that – ending a remarkable summer of amateur golf that included a runner-up finish at the Western Amateur – and has kept himself busy ever since. He made his professional debut at the Toledo Open and sprinkled various other professional starts among the next two stages of Q-School.
He always kept in mind advice he heard during a Q&A session with Mackenzie Tour president Jeff Monday at the Players Amateur this summer.
“He said the most important thing was inside of 50 yards so and I took that to heart and that’s part of what I really practiced and mentally focused on,” Wetterich said. “It allowed me to get to where I am right now.”
Wetterich is one of several recent college graduates in the field. That group also includes Brandon Wu, the Stanford senior who was presented with his diploma at Pebble Beach after making the cut in the U.S. Open (as an amateur), plus Texas A&M standout Chandler Phillips, Barry star Jorge Garcia and Yale’s James Nicholas, who did a turn on the Bulldog football team before committing to golf.
On the flip side of that, the field also includes Martin Piller, who owns six Korn Ferry Tour titles, and Andres Gonzales, who has won twice on this tour.
There are two current amateurs in the field this week: Kansas senior Andy Spencer and Duke senior Chandler Eaton.
Will Grimmer, who was a teammate of Wetterich’s at Ohio State, knows what that feels like. He entered Qualifying School as a senior a year ago, but only advanced as far as second stage and ultimately returned to finish his spring semester with the Buckeyes.
“Knowing the biggest thing I got out of it was experience, I don’t think necessarily I’d be at final stage this year if I didn’t experience what it takes,” said Grimmer, who is now a professional.
The Korn Ferry Q-school concludes on Sunday.
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