Monday qualifier Peter Kuest finishes top 10 at Valero, earns another start

Peter Kuest is making a habit of this.

After Monday qualifying for the Valero Texas Open, Kuest finished T10 at TPC San Antonio to earn a spot in the Corales Puntacana Championship (a TOUR Additional Event that runs opposite the RBC Heritage, the week following the Masters).

Kuest began the Valero final round in a share of 26th place, but he vaulted up the board with a closing 4-under 68 that included three birdies in a four-hole stretch around the turn. He followed a bogey at the par-3 16th with slightly disappointing pars on the gettable par-4 17th and par-5 18th holes, making his top-10 spot very much in limbo as the final groups came in.

When Ludvig Åberg – playing in the penultimate grouping – didn’t make eagle at the final hole, Kuest’s top-10 spot was secure.

“It's pretty draining after a Monday grinding it out, especially playing two extra holes, but then you've just got to reset mentally and go out and put in the work and then go play,” Kuest said after Sunday’s final round. “(Finishing top 10) was definitely something I wanted to do, but I was not really thinking about it. I just knew if I went out and played good golf, I would have a good chance at that. Now we just see what happens.”

In narrow fashion, it happened.

Kuest has struggled to make an impact on the Korn Ferry Tour this season, making just one cut in six starts. But his success at the Valero corresponds with his play on TOUR last season, where he finished T4 at the Rocket Mortgage Classic as a Monday qualifier and parlayed that result into Special Temporary Membership with a T17 at the following week’s John Deere Classic (he had also finished 14th at the AT&T Byron Nelson and T57 at the RBC Canadian Open earlier in the season). He ultimately failed to finish inside the top 125 in non-member FedExCup points, though, placing in the non-member 126-150 category that offered strong Korn Ferry Tour status but zero TOUR status for 2024.

The 25-year-old BYU alum now looks to change that. The Valero marked Kuest’s first TOUR start of 2024, and he’ll head to the Corales looking to build toward Special Temporary Membership once again. The Special Temporary Membership threshold for this season is 263 points (No. 150 on last year’s FedExCup Fall standings), and Kuest earned 67.5 non-member points with his four-way T10 at the Valero.