The last day of the last Professional Golfers Association Qualifying School Tournament in its current form was on Monday in La Quinta, California.
As you can see, the day was warm and strikingly beautiful.
Even though the tournament is free to attend, the two eighteen-hole golf courses at PGA West were nearly empty of spectators.
This allowed for an informality between the professional athletes such as Billy Horschel above right and their fans which felt rare at this level of professional sports.
The Qualifying School Tournament comes at the end of each year and is held either in the Coachella Valley or in Florida.
There are four levels of feeder tournaments throughout the country in order to arrive at this grueling six-day finale, and for years the top 25 cumulative scores secured a playing card for the PGA Tour for the following year, which is an extremely difficult item to obtain.
The rules are being changed after this year's event so that nobody like Dong-hwan Lee below right will be able to obtain their card direct from this tournament anymore.
Instead, winners will be fed into the minor league Web.com tour, which seems to have a new sponsor name every three years.
So congratulations to the four Cinderfellas who progressed through all the feeder tournaments and scored in the top 25, winning them a PGA tour card, including the 22-year-old Derek Ernst above left. (Click here for a short bio list of all 26 who graduated to the big show from the tournament.) More in the next post.
Makes me wish I was on holiday in the Coachella Valley.
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