Recap | 2025 VIC Open & NZ Open Qualifiers
It's starting to happen ...
Two qualifiers, two very different challenges, two well-played rounds … and two FTQs (failed to qualify).
I walked off the course at the last qualifier of the 2024 calendar year in mid-December with a bad taste in my mouth after having made triple-bogey on my second to last hole to knock myself out of contention. It took a few days and a little distance from the pressures of tournament golf to produce a clear assessment of what needed to happen for me to consistently shoot lower scores … an assessment I shared in my ‘(Aussie) Summer of Golf’ post last month.
The key takeaway from that evaluation was pretty simple … stop making big numbers. The birdies are there but so are the bogeys and doubles. Keep making the birdies, stop making the bogeys … easy, right?
Knowing my next qualifier was six weeks away, I immediately went to work on better course management and started seeing results in my day-to-day rounds at my home club. Since the first week in January, I haven’t had a single round over par at Commonwealth and reduced the amount of bogeys and doubles on my cards fairly dramatically. That improvement is on the back of slightly more conservative play off the tee and better targets when approaching greens. My go-to ball flight has also gotten a lot more consistent (a little cut) which has made managing my misses far easier. It’s amazing how well you can score when you have faith in what the ball will do off the club face.
Now, playing better and showing signs of improvement in local club competition is very different from doing it in a tournament with something on the line. There have been a few times in the last six months where I’ve been encouraged by what I’ve seen at home but failed to see that improvement carry over to tournaments. In fact, that has been one of the more frustrating parts of this whole experience.
Coming into the early February qualifiers however, something felt a bit different. It truly felt like the floor of my game had risen dramatically. I had seen the ceiling move upwards slowly since arriving in Australia but it took a lot longer for the floor to catch up.
The night before the VIC Open qualifier, I wrote down a handful of reminders in my yardage book cover for me to keep coming back to as I worked my way around the golf course the next day:
Trust the work
Be patient, be kind (to yourself)
Be yourself
Act like a pro
Have fun
The first principle on that list turned out to be an incredibly comforting three words and the one I came back to on nearly every shot I hit over the next two tournament rounds. I’ve worked so hard these last six months (and cranked that up even more the last six weeks) … I just needed to trust all the work would pay off when the bright lights came on.
VIC Open Qualifier - Sanctuary Lakes Golf Club (71, DNQ)
The best way to describe my jaunt around the Greg Norman-designed ‘might as well be in Florida’ golf course was … “mature”. Having played a practice round a few weeks prior, I came into the day with a really good game plan for getting myself around in what was forecasted to be windy conditions. And while that wind never really materialized, I stuck to that game plan for seventeen and a half holes with great success (we’ll get to that half a hole here shortly).
I executed that game plan to a ‘T’ over the first five holes:
Fairway, green, lip out.
Green, two putt.
Fairway, green, ten foot birdie attempt just slides past hole.
Fairway, good layup, pitch to ten feet, birdie attempt just slides past.
Fairway, green, birdie putt slides just past.
Five holes, five greens in regulation, five good looks at birdie, five pars! Hard to call it a dream start because I wasn’t making the putts (although all but one of those putts was hit exactly how I wanted to hit it), but I was hitting good shots and leaving the ball on the safe sides of flags, away from trouble and minimizing stress early in my round. It was all very mature and professional.
On the par-three sixth hole, I hit a solid shot to the middle of the green but left myself about forty feet to the hole. I watched one of my playing partners leave his putt short from the same line and I proceeded to add a little extra oomph to mine, leaving myself with a six footer coming back from beyond the hole. Again, I hit a great putt exactly where I aimed but the ball didn’t take the break and I walked away with my first bogey of the day. As it turns out, that would be my last (regular) bogey of the day …
After a par on seven, I hit two decent shots to get more or less pin high on the par-five eighth hole. Unfortunately I was left with a nearly impossible shot to get close having to come over a bunker to a tucked flag from a terrible lie. I played the mature shot, making sure I caught ball first and ensuring I landed (and stayed) on the green. When it finished rolling out, I had about thirty feet for birdie straight up the hill. After having over-read nearly every birdie attempt on the first seven holes, I recalibrated a bit and decided to play it more or less dead straight. The ball fell in the cup on the last roll and I turned the long putt into an unlikely birdie to get back to even par.
I backed that birdie up with a great drive on nine followed by a wedge to eighteen feet (to a really tricky pin just on top of a gully) and made the double breaking putt to get under par for the round. As I made the turn to number ten, it became obvious that it was going to take a pretty good number to grab one of the five qualifying spots available. At that point, I guessed it was going to take four or five under to get into a playoff and I wasn’t going to be surprised if someone shot six or seven under.
On ten, I found my drive at rest in a divot in the first cut of rough, but calmly thought through how I needed to play the shot (get a bit steeper and play to a more conservative target) and executed perfectly leaving myself another decent look at birdie. That putt just rolled past the cup and settled a foot beyond where I could easily tap in for a stress-free par.
On eleven, a difficult par-three playing about 205 yards to a back pin and into a left to right wind, I stood up on the tee and made my best swing of the day. The ball came to rest to pin high twenty feet from the back left flag and left me a very makeable putt for birdie. I saw the line perfectly the second I squatted behind the ball to judge the break and audibly mumbled to myself “birdie” before I even stroked the putt. Less than a minute later, I walked off the green with my third birdie in four holes and two-under par for my round.
Pars on twelve, thirteen, and fourteen kept me two-under par with four holes to go. Two gettable holes (fifteen and sixteen) and two fairly difficult holes (seventeen and eighteen). Knowing I had to get to at least four-under, I realized I had to make something happen in the immediate term or my chances of qualifying would be very slim.
After a good drive on fifteen, I was in between clubs on the approach to a back pin located on top of a shelf with a steep dropoff in front and behind the flag. Not wanting to fly the green, I hit a little less club and watched hopefully as it pitched just shy of the hole … before dropping my head in disappointment as it spun back down the slope to the middle of the green. What could have been a tap-in birdie turned into a challenging two-putt up and over the ridge. I misjudged the speed badly and hit my first putt nearly fifteen feet past the hole but was able to stay calm and bury the comebacker to save par and keep my hopes alive for at least one more hole.
Up to this point, I had hit every single green in regulation and the only blemish on my card came as a result of a three-putt on the sixth hole. I was hitting the ball great and was in total control of every shot. That context was important as I stood over my second shot into the par-five sixteenth, staring at a peninsula green with water on three sides knowing I probably needed to make something happen to get deep enough under par to qualify. With 260 to the hole and only 240 yards to cover the water in front with wind helping, I felt pretty comfortable I could get three-wood to green and give myself some kind of look at eagle. As I stood over the ball, I reminded myself to trust the work and fired. As I looked up to watch the ball, I know I had hit it good enough to cover the water but was surprised to see the ball drifting right. Two big bounces later (including one on a cart path right of the greenside bunkers), my ball came to rest in the middle of a nasty tuft of fescue grass … an impossibly unfair lie after a shot that probably deserved a little better. As I walked down the fairway to go find it, I realized the wind was much more off the left than it was helping. Whether it switched on me during the shot or if I just didn’t read it right, I’m not sure … but it is a classic example of how finicky golf can be.
One hack, two chips, and two putts later … I made a double bogey seven and dropped back to even par for the round and certainly out of contention. I took a risk to make an eagle and it backfired on me. I don’t regret the decision and I don’t even really lament the swing I put on the ball. I just got unlucky with where it ended up. Could I have played the next few shots better? Probably … but the intent on each of them was good. I kept my head up walking off the green, mumbled a bad word under my breath and took it on the chin.
A par on the 230-yard par three seventeenth and a tap-in birdie on eighteen (after an unreal high, cut 8-iron to a foot from 166 yards) gave me a round of one-under par 71 to finish around 20th place in an event with close to eighty guys competing. It was my lowest tournament round in a while and a reminder that the work was paying off, especially the ball striking. Had I made a few more putts early, I probably wouldn’t have been in the position I was in to force something on the sixteenth hole. If I play that round ten more times, I almost certainly shoot three, four, or five under par half of of them and that is encouraging.
NZ Open Qualifier - Sands Resort Torquay (74, DNQ)
A week later, I got another chance at proving the work was paying off at the Victoria qualifier for the NZ Open. This time, I had to finish in the top two to qualify against one of the strongest fields you’ll ever find in an Aussie Tour qualifying event. The NZ Open is a massive event every year and because it is co-sponsored by the Asian Tour, less guys than usual automatically qualify and a big chunk of the Aussie Tour regulars have to go through qualifying.
Beyond the challenge of a highly competitive field and a very small percentage of players actually qualifying … we had the pleasure of battling sustained 25mph winds gusting to over 40mph on an extremely exposed part of the country. Torquay is famous for being a prime surfing location in Australia and the course sits about a kilometer or two from the Southern Ocean. When all was said and done, it ended up being one of the most difficult rounds of golf I had ever played thanks to the constant battering of that wind.
The good news is that I had played a practice round the day prior in the same wind. The bad news is that I had played from the back tees assuming that is where we would be playing the event from (we almost always play everything from the very back) … but when I got the first tee on the day of the event, I noticed everything had been moved up a tee box. So all the homework I had done in the practice round to get yardages to different bunkers and sort out what clubs I wanted to hit off the back tee boxes got eaten by the dog and I was left scrambling to do it all on the fly. Yeah, moving tee boxes up probably made the course playable on a day when things could have gone REALLY wrong … but I felt like I lost a bit of my advantage (being super prepared).
The round itself was a rollercoaster of epic proportions. I knew coming into the day I was going to make bogeys given the wind and extreme difficulty of a few holes because of that wind. I was just hopeful I’d be able to take advantage of the downwind holes and keep mistakes to a minimum. As it turned out, I did a good job of minimizing damage on the bad holes (nothing worse than bogey) but found myself holing out for bogey on seven different occasions. On the flip side, I made three birdies and an awesome eagle on the par-five sixteenth.
I made bogey on all four par-threes which was a kick in the nuts. Two of those came on missed shortish putts (one I was nearly blown over by the wind and one I misread a five-footer). One was the result of my approach shot coming to rest in a footprint in a bunker (I simply don’t understand how this is possible in a event with all professional golfers but alas, some folks just don’t give a sh*t) and me having to hit my bunker shot away from the hole to even have a chance of saving par. And the last par-three bogey was the result of a bad guess at how hard the wind would hit my five-iron approach shot.
I drove the ball great all day, only missing two fairways. I drove the ball LONG on two downwind par-five’s leaving myself nine-irons into both and making one birdie and one eagle on those two holes.
I also hit the shot of the year on the fifteenth hole after leaving myself a nearly impossible 67 yard pitch downwind to a front pin nestled just over a bunker. I had roughly a one square yard piece of green that I could land the ball on to get it close. Just hitting that piece of green wasn’t going to be good enough as I needed enough spin to take advantage of the little upslope I was pitching into to get the ball to bounce right and take the slope down to the pin. And as we know, generating a ton of spin downwind can be challenging. The good news was that I had anticipated the pin I was staring down during the practice round and imagined that very shot in my head. So standing over it I felt like I could at least get the ball within twenty feet if I hit an awesome shot and worst case I was going to be at the back of the green with a forty-footer up the hill. I ended up nipping the ball absolutely perfectly, landing it right on my spot, and watching as it disappeared behind the bunker heading towards the flag. One of the caddies in my group was up by the green and let out a yelp as it got close to the hole, telling me afterwards it had lipped out. When I walked up to the green, I had three feet left for birdie and calmly knocked it in to fight back to three-over par at the time.
I made my aforementioned eagle on the next hole to get to one-over par and walked off feeling like there was an outside chance of even par making a playoff just because the conditions were so bad. The footprint bunker bogey followed on the seventeenth and I had to make a ridiculous up and down on the final hole to shoot two-over par 74. As it turned out, the tees being moved up made it far easier than I had anticipated and three-under ended up qualifying. I finished middle of the pack but beat a lot of really good players in the conditions. I walked away once again feeling like my game held up to a proper test and despite the middle of the pack finish, I held my own against the really high calibre players in my group.
The next month is a big one for me on the road to Q-School. I’m up in Queensland this week with Dom to do a tune up before heading off to play in the New Zealand PGA Championship (different from the NZ Open) the first week of March in Hastings, NZ on the north island. I’m super excited to get another opportunity to play a proper tournament and am hoping to continue building confidence by playing well there as I ramp up for Q-school in April. I’ll be back in a few weeks with a preview and recap of my week in New Zealand.
In the meantime, I hope everyone is staying warm/safe back in the US and cool/safe here in Australia. Thanks again for all of the kinds words you’ve sent through over the past few months … it means a lot to see the support out there.
Keep climbing y’all.