Tournament Preview: 2025 New Zealand PGA Championship

March 6th-9th, 2025 | Hastings Golf Club

Another bite at the apple this week!

Third Aussie Tour invite … third (relatively) remote tournament location. After adventuring to Papa New Guinea in August and driving six hours through the Western Australia outback to get to Kalgoorlie for the WA PGA Championship in October, I’m back on the road to the north island of New Zealand to play in the NZ PGA Championship.

After four full months of failing to qualify for event after event and watching from afar, I’m excited to get back inside the ropes and prove (mainly to myself) how far my game has come this year. I have desperately missed that feeling of standing on the first tee of a multi-day tournament knowing I have at least thirty-six holes to procure some magic. The optimism coursing through my blood in that moment my name is announced is akin to watching your favorite football team take the field for the first time in the Super Bowl. Zero zero, sixty minutes to play … anything can happen.

Getting to this point has not been without obstacle. Exactly 17 days ago, I was up in Queensland visiting coach Dom when I strained an intercostal muscle hitting balls on the range. What was supposed to be a week of golf bootcamp turned into me doing everything and anything to limit the movement of my right arm and shoulder. Breathing, laughing, laying down, they all hurt … and sneezing felt like getting shot. I spent five straight days with Laura, my amazing physio who works with a lot of Dom’s players and we started doing everything in our power to get me ready in time for the NZ PGA. At one point early on in the recovery process, we all thought the chances of me playing were very small and it was looking like I would have to withdraw.

After nine full days of rest (I was only able to chip and putt a little), I hit 35 balls on the range and waited for the pain to return … but it never did. I was still a tiny bit ache-y, but I was physically able to go through the motion of swinging the club at 75% to 80% speed. Over the next few days I gradually hit more balls at higher speeds while remaining super careful about not doing too much too soon. Things felt good but it was going to be hard to make a final decision until after I played a round of golf to ensure I could handle a variety of lies and shots. Three days before my flight was scheduled to leave for Wellington, I took the biggest step of my recovery and put my name down on the tee sheet to play. One quick warm up and 70 shots later, I walked off feeling great and barring no setbacks over the next two days, was confident I could play the event.

I was relieved … it had been a hard couple of weeks. The injury itself was frustrating but feeling as though I was going to miss a great chance to play another event in the middle of one of my best ever stretches of golf was mentally devastating. Working so hard for something only to lose an awesome opportunity would have been a shame.

The obvious question here is how will that two week stretch of playing zero golf impact my ability to compete this week … and it’s one I’ve been slowly trying to sort out myself. I’ve regressed a little with my full swing primarily because I just haven’t had a chance to practice and play as much. But that is slowly coming back and I’ll talk a bit more about what I’m doing to get things polished before Thursday in the ‘prep’ section below. The short game is still sharp enough to compete and I’ve invested a lot of time and energy into that aspect of the game. I guess the real answer to the question is that I just won’t know until the lights come on and I have a scorecard in my hands …

The Event

Tournament: 2025 Wallace Development New Zealand PGA Championship
Golf Course: Hastings Golf Club
Location: Hastings, Hawkes Bay, New Zealand
Live Scoring: Link Here

The second of back to back New Zealand events on the Australasian Tour schedule, the NZ PGA is not as grand in scope (or purse) as the NZ Open but the country and the Kiwi’s who play in it are incredibly proud to play host to the region’s best players.

Much like the NZ Open, there is a rich history of big name players participating in and winning this event including Peter Thompson, Bob Charles, Tony Jacklin, and Frank Nobilo (currently of NBC/Golf Channel broadcasting fame). The event has been played on and off since 1908 with 2023 being the last time it was an Aussie Tour event.

The prize purse is on the lower side of of Aussie Tour events at $175k AUD but comes at a critical time of the year as everyone fights for final Order of Merit points in an effort to keep their jobs for next year. With only three events left this year, everyone is trying to avoid having to go back to Q-School.

The Course

Hastings Golf Club is a tight, tree-lined 7000 yard golf course with some of the narrowest fairways I’ve ever seen in a few places. There is an interesting combination of subtle doglegs and incredibly straight holes that are almost disconcerting in how undeviating they are.

It is also one of the best conditioned golf courses I have ever played. Tee boxes, fairways, greens … all perfect. Greens are fairly quick but not scary fast and they don’t have a single blemish in them. Any putts missed this week will be operator error, not due to bad greens.

The name of the game will be hitting fairways. It is really easy to lose a drive just a little right or left and find yourself stuck behind a tree. The trees lining the fairways aren’t dense, but they are well placed in landing zones.

Assuming you’ve hit the fairway, the second challenge is dealing with heavily sloped greens that seemingly have drop offs on all four sides. They are almost all pitched back to front and the shaved embankments can take decent shots and send them fifteen or twenty yards down into greenside gullies that make for difficult up and downs. Finding the middle of the greens and being happy with twenty footers (a.k.a patience) will be crucial to scoring well.

The Field

For a low purse event, the field is really really good this week. Most of the current winners from this year’s Aussie Tour are here including last week’s NZ Open winner Ryan Peake (go do a quick Google search on him if you haven’t heard his story, it’s unreal).

Outside of the normal Aussie Tour exemption categories, the tournament organizers had a number of invitations to give out amongst the NZ golf community (specifically the top players on the NZ Professional Tour) and a group of international players. Most of the international invites went to guys playing on different non-Aussie Tours like the Asian or Latin American Tours. I was lucky enough to grab one of those international spots … not because I’m playing on another Tour but because we lobbied hard for me to get one more chance as my game has progressed dramatically from my last opportunity at the WA PGA. I’m incredibly grateful to the tournament organizers for the opportunity and feel like I truly belong this time around.

The Preparation

My prep work is a tale of three distinct phases. The super long-range prep has been unreal. I’ve documented that in previous posts and won’t go into detail here but the summary is that I’m a far better player today than I was even two months ago.

The medium term prep (the last three weeks) hasn’t been ideal because of my injury. As outlined in my intro, I absolutely lost some ground while I was dealing with my injury. I’m not as sharp as I was prior to the issues. But that doesn’t mean I’m have regressed all the way back to where I was in September or October. I’m still far better off than I was and I’m rapidly regaining my comfort levels as tournament week has progressed.

And finally, the short term tournament prep. I played eighteen holes on Monday and nine today (Tuesday as I’m writing this). We got great weather the first two days of the week and I was able to not only play but get some low-pressure practice in off the course. I didn’t hit the ball great on Monday but got much closer to what we want on Tuesday and I expect to take another step forward tomorrow as I get my final prep done. The goal for tomorrow is to take things very easy so I have plenty of energy come Thursday morning. The nice weather is now over so I’ll be battling some wind and cold the next few days but getting nine holes in tomorrow in those conditions will give me a chance to see what Thursday’s weather is likely to bring.

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I’ll be back at some point during or after the tournament with an update on how things went. Normally I’d say something like if I make the cut I’ll have an update immediately after round 2 because I’ll be stoked to write about my performance or if I miss the cut, you may not hear from me for a bit because I’ll be licking my wounds. But this week I’m really not thinking about results and instead just focusing on process. Mantra this week is to just trust the work I’ve done to put myself in this position and let the chips fall as they may. As a result, you’ll have to just be okay with hearing from me when you hear from me :).

As always, thanks for the support and chat soon!

Keep climbing y’all …