The Break: The power of Q-School

Hi everyone, welcome to The Break! I’m changing things up with the newsletter, trying to write about things I actually care about that I don’t touch on anywhere else. Hope you’ll enjoy.

Q-School is a great lesson

I think the vast majority of sports fans mostly care about sports to see athletic greatness. They want to see the best of the best doing unfathomable things (and they hope those elite athletes compete for their team or rooting interest).

The great thing about sports is greatness is pretty easy to measure: wins, championships, stats. There’s the Eye Test. Unlike greatness at practically anything else in life, it happens quickly in sports, and it’s all out in the open for everyone to see.

For many fans, a parasocial relationship develops between them and athletes. There’s a lot of first-person thrown around when talking about athletes — especially a lot of first-person plural when talking about teams. There’s a lot of “we” thrown around in those conversations. We won. We’re great. (We lost. We stink.)

There’s also a cluster of sports fans who want to see the athletes that finally get their day in the sun. These fans want to root for the underdog who just hasn’t quite been able to break through. They want to see an athlete’s toil, mostly quiet and in anonymity, get paid off in a big way.

That’s the draw of Q-School, a uniquely golf thing that is finishing or unfolding this week on three tours. The LPGA Q-School is wrapping up in Alabama, seemingly headed to a Monday finish. PGA Tour Q-School starts Thursday in Ponte Vedra Beach, while the LIV Golf Promotions event offers a single LIV Golf spot this week in Saudi Arabia.

I’m one of those kinds of people who always checks to see who the Monday qualifiers are, and I’m one of those people who were sad to learn the PGA Tour intends to drastically cut back Monday qualifying opportunities in 2026. While I know the Monday qualifiers for any event are typically the longest of long shots to win, I also love that they have an opportunity to do well enough to make some money that’s important to their professional journey and maybe even earn another bite at the apple the following week with a top-10 finish.

Then, after a slog of a season, comes Q-School. That’s a different animal, with a much bigger feeling of finality to it.

For a player who gets a card or guaranteed starts, through Q-School, their year has a layer of security and predictability to it that can be vital to a pro looking to start or salvage their career.

For a player who comes up short at the final hurdle, it’s a devastating blow. Q-School is a make-or-break week for many players — a last gasp for a player who is out of money, out of energy or otherwise out of options. Pro golf is a brutal game, but the bounty of Q-School is pollen for the downtrodden.

The truth is, more players walk away sad than happy from Q-School. On the PGA Tour, the top five and ties get cards. The top 40 and ties after that get guaranteed starts on the Korn Ferry Tour. On the LPGA side, the top 25 and ties after a five-round slog get status, while everyone else has Epson Tour membership in their back pocket. For LIV, there’s just one spot available this year, down from three last year, as they place emphasis on the Asian Tour International Series as a viable career path.

But for the ones that succeed, the power of that moment is incredible. There are smiles, tears, plenty of drinks, lots of calls and so much joy. It’s a launch pad. It’s another chance. It’s the week of a lifetime.

It is those moments that draw me to Q-School. It’s inspirational.

Life is hard. Finding contentment is really hard. Achieving big goals can feel impossible. What winning looks like is complicated. There are a lot of hours — years, even — that go into making something special happen. Most people will never see that work, and they’ll never fully understand it.

Lots of high achievers would tell you that contentment comes with falling in love with the work. The big wins are just a product of devotion, skill and timing. Make no mistake, though: The wins matter. Proving to yourself that you can do it matters, and it helps the next time, and the next time, and the next time.

That’s why I love this week. I get to see the visceral joy of success in a single moment whose outcome is easy to understand. People are achieving their dreams after an astounding amount of hard work. It offers me a temporary hit of delusion that I am, for sure, going to do the same in what I’m chasing. It’s a helpful moment to see what that really looks like, and I dream about what it’ll feel like for me.

I’m no better than any other sports fan. My parasocial moment is seeing someone on the periphery grind through a draining experience and come out a winner on the other side. I can root for those people.

I have people rooting for me. And you have people rooting for you. That support means so much, even if sometimes it’s easy to forget or hard to see.

Sometimes, though, it just helps a little to see the ball go in the hole.

The Links

Scottie Scheffler won the Hero World Challenge on Sunday for his ninth win this year, and he’s quickly heading toward 100 consecutive weeks as world No. 1.

The International Series top player gets a LIV Golf spot for the next year. The problem is that player in 2024 is Joaquin Niemann.

The Grant Thornton Invitational is this week, as Jason Day and Lydia Ko look to repeat in Florida.