Kaito Onishi won the Korn Ferry Tour‘s UNC Health Championship presented by STITCH on Sunday when he fired off a 4th round 66 to beat Max McGreevy by one stroke and that one stroke likely changed the trajectory of his professional career forever.
For winning the Korn Ferry Tour’s UNC Health Championship presented by STITCH, Kaito Onish earned $180,000 for 1st place but more importantly, he moved up to 12th place in the KFT standings.
At the end of the season, the top 30 players from the Korn Ferry Tour qualify for the PGA Tour. But how he got here is wild.The popular ‘
On the final day of the final Korn Ferry Tour event last season, the Nationwide Children’s Hospital Championship, Onishi shot 68 to move into t24 in the tournament. At the time, he was 107th in points on the tour but moving up 34 spots in the final day of the final tournament earned him enough points to move to 100th. The top 100 players retain their conditional KFT cards.
Attempting to gain full Korn Ferry Tour status, Onishi came up short in the 1st stage of qualification (for full status) and withdrew. But with conditional status, he was able to get into the 4th KFT event of the season and went out and finished tied for 8th.
That was good enough to bump him up to full status on the Korn Ferry Tour and get into the UNC Health Championship last weekend where he won by a single stroke and earned $180,000.
More importantly, he now sits in 12th place in the Korn Ferry Tour standings and with the top 30 earning PGA Tour cards he is on the fast track to PGA Tour status next year. For context, the 30th player in the 2023 KFT standings qualified for the PGA Tour with 862 points. Onishi now has 633 points with 14 events left on the season and full status on the tour to play all of the events.
One stroke!
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