First Stage DP World Tour Q-School
After a couple weeks off spending time with friends in Atlanta I flew over to Bristol, UK for First Stage of the DP World Tour Qualifying School at The Players Club. This is a series of 3 tournaments finishing with Final Stage in the 2nd week of November where the top 25 finishers will receive their DP World Tour playing right for the 2023-2024 season. You have to finish in a certain position each tournament to move on to the next.
My first challenge of the week was realizing that I’d booked a manual rental car instead of an automatic which I now know aren’t very common in the UK. I bunny hopped my entire way from the airport to my Air BnB but managed to get there in one piece. After a couple of days driving and a few youtube tutorials later I had it under control.
The course was a really good challenge, there were a couple of long holes and it was a little cooler than the States which was a welcome change, the greens were a lot slower and not as true. It felt a lot more like back home to be honest. The course wasn’t in amazing shape but it was still good. I played well the first 3 rounds but just couldn’t quite get it together and made a bunch of silly errors. I was +9 through the first 3 rounds, about 4 shots outside of qualifying, I knew I needed a good last round of at least -4 to get through to the top 19 which was the qualifying number.
I birdied the first 3 holes of my final round to really give myself some belief that I could get the job done, I played some really steady golf, even rolled a few putts in and found myself right around the number with 3 holes to go, I was really feeling the pressure. I hit 3 awesome tee shots on the last 3 holes and managed to make a birdie on the 8th hole to get to +4 total which I thought would get in comfortable. After a good par on the 440m par 4 9th hole to finish I was confident I had made it and was absolutely stoked.
I ended up making it on the number at +4. I’ve learnt a lot over the past couple of months and the main thing has just been to never give up, to fight for every single shot out there. I’ve had too many close calls the past few months. I was really proud of how I handled myself, I tried really hard and had a result go my way. Even though I’d made mistakes during the week I just wanted to keep grinding and I was rewarded.
Now I will be heading over to Spain in the first week of November for Second Stage of Qualifying School.
Thank you for the support, Sam.
