What's past is not always prologue, sports remind us, and so we pause now to remember the players who won their first PGA TOUR event, made their first TOUR Championship, broke through in a major, finally made a Presidents Cup or Ryder Cup roster, or broke through in some other significant way in 2024. Scottie Scheffler captured his first FedExCup title, but notwithstanding that important first by the world No. 1, the last 12 months proved how unpredictable golf can be.

Before we begin to preview 2025, which is coming soon, let’s first look at a few of those players who leveled up their careers in 2024. For the record, we predicted who would be on this list at the start of the year and we were surprised to see we got a few right.

Here are the eight players who leveled up in 2024.

Sahith Theegala

He’s one of the few on this list who didn’t win a tournament in 2024, but Sahith Theegala’s overall body of work more than merited inclusion.

Theegala registered a career-high nine top 10s and a career-low four missed cuts. Along with a pair of runner-up finishes at The Sentry and RBC Heritage, Theegala finished third in the FedExCup, by far the best showing of his young career. He lept into the top 20 in the Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR) for the first time, climbing as high as 11th. And in September, the American earned a spot on the Presidents Cup team, his first national team appearance, and went 1-1-1.

Theegala’s overall leap was fueled by drastic improvements off the tee. He was known through his amateur and early professional days as a wild card with the driver, so much so that Theegala admitted he felt “hopeless to a certain extent. I just felt like I'm never going to be an elite driver of the ball, and I was OK with it.”

Offseason work with his swing coach Rick Hunter and trainer Josh Loyo spurred a solution. They collaborated to strengthen Theegala’s base and core, addressing limitations that were causing him to succumb to too much lateral side bend on the downswing, his body almost collapsing in transition.

The result was a career season. Theegala hit his drives farther and more accurately than any other season on TOUR. After ranking outside the top 90 in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee in his first three seasons, Theegala ranked 27th in 2024 and gained more strokes in the category than any other.

Akshay Bhatia

Akshay Bhatia could have been on this list last year, and it’s conceivable he could be on it again a year from now, which speaks to the potential and progress he’s already shown at the age of 22.

The young American grabbed his second TOUR victory at this year’s Valero Texas Open, boat-racing all but one man – Denny McCarthy – whom Bhatia ultimately outlasted in a playoff.

If Theegala’s improvement with the driver felt stark, Bhatia’s complete reversal on the greens was downright shocking. Bhatia struggled mightily on the greens in 2023, ranking 183rd out of 193 qualified golfers in SG: Putting.

“I’m definitely searching for who I was as a junior,” Bhatia told PGATOUR.COM during the summer of 2023. “I felt like I was one of the best putters in junior golf, amateur golf. I’m trying to just figure it out.”

That search led Bhatia to a broomstick-style putter last fall, and it has remained in the bag ever since. Bhatia transformed from one of the worst putters on TOUR to a nearly elite level. He ranked 33rd in SG: Putting in 2024 and was a top-10 putter from inside 10 feet.

That led to a career-high 12 top 25s and his first trip to the TOUR Championship. Bhatia, who cracked the top 30 in the OWGR for the first time, also contended until the very end at the Rocket Mortgage Classic, when a rare lapse on the greens reminded that as far as he's come, he still has room to level up yet again next season.

Xander Schauffele

It’s hard to level up when you’re already a top-10 player in the world, but winning two majors in the way Xander Schauffele won them more than merits inclusion on this list. He removed himself from the flattering but undesirable category of “one of the best never to win a major” and put himself on the shortlist of the best players of his generation. Others have won multiple majors in one season, but going from zero to two career majors as quickly as Schauffele did it is rare, indeed. In a world without Scheffler, Schauffele would have been the runaway Player of the Year and undisputed best player in the world.

He’ll settle for No. 2, for now, though it’s not hard to imagine he could be No. 1 at this time next year.

Schauffele took the leap in large part thanks to distance gains he made over the offseason. Working with swing coach Chris Como, Schauffele tweaked a few parts of his swing to maximize his speed. He jumped from 46th to 11th in SG: Off-the-Tee, ranked eighth in club head speed and added four yards of distance, all while hitting more fairways than he did in 2023.

Combine that with a top-10 approach game, the best scrambling percentage on TOUR, and a top-15 putting season, and it’s easy to see why Schauffele broke through and won the PGA Championship and The Open Championship.

Maverick McNealy

Maverick McNealy began 2024 on a medical extension, needing a stable start to the season just to keep his card. Gone are his days on shaky ground. McNealy won the season-ending RSM Classic, but even without that, the talented but oft-injured pro was already on the rise.

The Stanford grad set career bests for top 10s (six), top 25s (12) and made-cut percentage (81%). He finished eighth in SG: Total, far surpassing his previous best season (39th in 2022). The win was a fitting end to McNealy’s resurgent season, but the progress was there in plain sight. Now it has the spotlight.

Stephan Jaeger

The only man to get between Scheffler and five straight victories, Stephan Jaeger topped the world No. 1 by a single shot at the Texas Children’s Houston Open for his maiden TOUR title. It was the only tournament Scheffler didn’t win in between the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard and the RBC Heritage.

Jaeger’s leap is also born out of distance gains. In his words, he was “crooked and short” off the tee – not a good combo. The stats showed it as he ranked 184th in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee in 2021-22 and was outside the top 125 in Driving Distance and Accuracy. He has gained 12 yards since then and ranked inside the top 25 on TOUR in Driving Distance last season, while also improving his accuracy.

Jaeger finished 43rd in the FedExCup, advancing to the BMW Championship for the first time to secure spots in next year’s Signature Events. He also jumped to 53rd in the OWGR after beginning the year outside the top 100.

Matthieu Pavon

The Frenchman’s first season on TOUR was an enormous success – one that nearly didn’t happen. Matthieu Pavon needed to birdie the final four holes of the 2023 DP World Tour Championship just to earn a PGA TOUR card through the newly created pathway that offered dual membership to the DP World Tour's top performers.

He took full advantage. Pavon won the Farmers Insurance Open in January, held the No. 1 spot on the FedExCup through two months of the season and contended down the stretch of the U.S. Open, holding his own against Rory McIlroy, Bryson DeChambeau and Patrick Cantlay. He was also nominated for Rookie of the Year, which was eventually won by Nick Dunlap.

Robert MacIntyre

While Pavon was a surprise standout from the 10 DP World Tour players who earned TOUR status, Robert MacIntyre was more of a known commodity going into 2024. Still, winning twice on TOUR and jumping into the top 15 of the OWGR was above and beyond all reasonable expectations, earning MacIntyre a spot on this list.

The Scot was one of the emotional epicenters of the season, winning his first TOUR event with his greenskeeper father on the bag at the RBC Canadian Open. Somehow it got even more emotional the next month when he birdied the 72nd hole to win his national open, the Genesis Scottish Open, by a shot over Adam Scott.

Max Greyserman

After a sluggish start to 2024, Max Greyserman notched three runner-up finishes and zero missed cuts over the final six months to supercharge a run up the FedExCup standings and reach the BMW Championship, securing a spot in the Signature Events in '25.

It was a remarkable rise for the rookie who looked destined for a demotion to the Korn Ferry Tour three months into the season. But the leap he made was noticeable and tangible. Greyserman was a top-20 player over the second half of the year, per Data Golf’s strokes gained metrics, which showed him playing better than the likes of Shane Lowry, Justin Thomas and Adam Scott.

That’s heady territory for the Rookie of the Year nominee.