How Matt McCarty is at The Sentry mere months after competing on the Korn Ferry Tour

Matt McCarty missed his PGA TOUR card by four strokes at the 2023 Korn Ferry Tour season finale, and you could find all those strokes on a single hole: the par-4 18th in the third round. He found the water twice off the tee and made a quadruple-bogey 8.

It might have been the best thing for his career.

“I feel like you earn it when you’re ready,” McCarty said a year later, his PGA TOUR card firmly in hand.

After the final round in southern Indiana, facing a third Korn Ferry Tour season in 2024, McCarty was more concerned with consoling his good friend Mason Andersen, who also fell short of his dream on the season’s final weekend. McCarty then asked himself how he could get better. He identified three pillars (driving distance, wedges and putting). Improvements in those facets led to a three-win Korn Ferry Tour campaign that was followed shortly by his first PGA TOUR victory.

This week, the 2025 PGA TOUR season begins at The Sentry, the annual gathering in Maui of the previous year’s tournament winners and top 50 in the FedExCup. McCarty is the only player there who began the previous season on the Korn Ferry Tour. It’s a testament to his rapid rise and the reason he’s one of the most intriguing players in the field.

McCarty, who began 2024 ranked 430th in the world, is now No. 46.

He is the first to win three times in a Korn Ferry Tour season since Wesley Bryan in 2016. That would’ve been enough for McCarty to consider the season a success.

Then he won the inaugural Black Desert Championship in just his second start as a PGA TOUR member. That’s how he earned a spot at Maui’s Kapalua Resort this week. His first season on TOUR also will include starts at the year’s first three majors.

McCarty and Jason Gore (2005) are the only players to earn a Three-Victory Promotion from the Korn Ferry Tour and win on the PGA TOUR in the same year. Like Gore, McCarty’s wins came fast and furious, rapidly changing the trajectory of his career.

All four of McCarty’s wins in 2024 came in the span of 10 starts. The 27-year-old had never won as a professional before this season.

Phoenix-based instructor Dave Williams has been McCarty’s only swing instructor, and the relationship could be described as part golf instruction, part philosophy. The duo might spend three hours together on a given day, McCarty said, with one hour of instruction and two hours of conceptual discussion about golf and life.

“I started going to him when I was 12 or 13, and still do,” McCarty said. “It’s been cool to stick with the process and do it my way in a comfortable aspect, which is nice.”

“He’s actually in my phone as Dave Guru,” added McCarty’s caddie Devrath Das, a college teammate at Santa Clara who has looped for him since early 2022. “I think he’s more of a philosopher than a swing coach. He’s someone we can call regardless of a great finish, a bad finish. He expects (success) out of Matt, and that’s really refreshing for us.

“After the first win it’s, ‘What’s next? What are you doing next?’ Dave’s such a solid person in Matt’s life.”

Shortly after the 2023 Korn Ferry Tour Championship, the conversation between McCarty and Williams inevitably went to the quadruple bogey that put his TOUR career on hold. They reviewed the left-handed McCarty’s setup on that fateful 18th hole, a dogleg-right par 4 with water down the right side. They identified that McCarty aimed well left of the fairway, intending to take the trouble out of play and hit a draw back toward the short grass. Yet he double-crossed it, the ball finding a watery grave. Williams wanted to know: Why didn’t McCarty play a fade?

“You can’t aim far enough away from the trouble before you’ll find it,” Williams said. “Because that’s in your brain, ‘Don’t go over here. Don’t go over here.’ Your subconscious, it’s impossible not to do something. You can’t not do something. If you can stand over the ball thinking of everything you’re not supposed to do, you can’t move, because you have nothing to do. … Your subconscious is a non-judgmental part of your brain, so when you say, ‘Don’t go in the water,’ all it hears is ‘go in the water.’”

Fortified by this and other wisdom, McCarty attacked the offseason and set the stage for a mind-bending 2024 on the Korn Ferry Tour. He used the Stack System to gain distance, ranking 89th of 145 qualifying players in Driving Distance (302.2 yards). Two years earlier, he was third-to-last on the Korn Ferry Tour in that metric. He carried more fairway bunkers and attacked more hole locations with wedges, capitalizing on his improved distance control with shorter clubs, another point of offseason emphasis. Meanwhile, he kept listening to Williams.

The coach describes McCarty as an elite-level learner, whether the learning involves a technical adjustment or even a parable.

“When you tell Matt something,” Williams said, “it’s not like, ‘Williams told me.’ He assimilates it quickly. I think it’s extraordinary. It’s the way learning ought to be. He adopts it as his own point of view. He owns it.”

It all converged on the back nine Sunday at the Black Desert Championship, as McCarty took the tee at the drivable par-4 14th with a one-stroke lead. A previous version of McCarty might have laid up for a wedge approach, playing to his traditional strengths. But this was a new McCarty with increased distance and increased self-belief, two crucial ingredients for the ensuing moment. He went for the green, feathering a 3-wood from 297 yards to 4 feet for a crucial eagle that extended his lead to three shots. That was the final margin of victory, rubber-stamping his exempt PGA TOUR status through 2026 and a plethora of perks – like this week’s tee time on Maui.

“If I hit it well, I knew it was enough,” McCarty said. “I never thought about hitting anything else, to be honest.”

McCarty was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and spent his early years mostly in Seattle, Washington. He played golf at Riverbend Golf Complex, a driving range and adjacent par-3 course. Playing baseball and basketball helped him develop elite hand-eye coordination. McCarty inherited athletic genes – his dad Scott is an avid golfer whose handicap has approached scratch, and his grandpa Ray Prokopchak played college football at Arizona State.

McCarty, though, was comparatively undersized. Accuracy and the short game were his strengths. He was 12 when he beat his dad for the first time, after which the elder McCarty set off to find him a coach.

“He said, ‘I don’t think you’re going to listen to me anymore,’” McCarty said with a laugh.

Scott McCarty was cognizant of golf’s potential pitfalls – namely paralysis by analysis – and wanted to find a feel-based coach. Through a mutual friend, he was introduced to Williams, a longtime instructor who played competitively in his younger years and tried Q-School five times. Williams’ main teaching influences are Manuel de la Torre and Ernest Jones, who viewed body motion as a response to arm motion.

Williams suggests concepts and lets the player figure out what works. With McCarty, it harkens back to their early days working together, when Williams suggested McCarty try a 10-finger grip – a rarity in TOUR circles. McCarty liked it and hasn’t looked back.

“It’s been nice to see that gradual climb,” McCarty said. “It’s cliché, but just trying to get one percent better every day.”

McCarty was a good high school player – 2014 Arizona Junior Match Play champion, 2015 state championship co-medalist – but he wasn’t a can’t-miss prospect. He relished his time at Santa Clara, playing five seasons (2016-21).

McCarty expects much of himself and plays with fire, but he learned through his first two Korn Ferry Tour seasons that he needed to get better at letting bad shots go. McCarty has also worked for the past few years with mental performance coach Jeff Becker, who mostly works with basketball players, and he has enjoyed the perspective of someone from outside golf’s hive mind.

One day, he told Williams, it just clicked.

“That was another thing that changed this past year,” Williams said. “He said, ‘I decided one day, I can’t afford to use up that energy. I’m going to need it on the last day of the tournament. I just decided to stop getting mad.’”

His game was incrementally building already, but the synergy of physical and mental improvements created a sort of multiplier effect.

“There are moments where you get a little frustrated or down on yourself,” McCarty said. “I handled that better this year than last year.”

By early July 2024, McCarty was 27th on the Korn Ferry Tour’s points list. The top 30 at season’s end would earn their PGA TOUR cards. He was on the good side of the bubble, but work remained.

That’s where everything changed.

McCarty opened with rounds of 65-68-64, building a three-stroke lead heading into Sunday. Like at the Korn Ferry Tour Championship the prior autumn, he seemed poised for a breakout moment.

McCarty, though, struggled on the greens, shot 75 and tied for fifth place, six strokes back of winner Cristobal del Solar. Even so, Williams sensed a change in his student. It wasn’t the desired result, but it wasn’t for a lack of tools; McCarty showed he was skilled enough to win.

McCarty learned in Colorado that he didn’t need to be perfect to win. His ball-striking wasn’t flawless, he realized, but he could’ve won if not for one shaky Sunday on the greens.

“Learning anything about yourself, philosophically, is about learning what it’s not before you learn what it is,” Williams said. “It’s like riding a bike; no amount of information is going to give you access to riding a bike. You have to wobble a bit – left, right, left, right, left – and then you discover balance. … By elimination of what it isn’t, we eventually perhaps could arrive at what it is. … Coming up the 18th fairway the last day, he turned to (caddie) Dev and he says, ‘We will be back. I can do this.’ There was a defiance there of, ‘I know I can.’ It went from, ‘I think I can,’ to, ‘I know that I can.’”

“Bobby Jones had a great statement,” Williams continued. “‘I never learned anything from a match I won. I learned much more from the ones I didn’t win.’”

McCarty defeated doubt and won the next week’s Price Cutter Charity Championship presented by Hiland Dairy Foods, his first Korn Ferry Tour title in his 68th start. He was just getting started.

In August, McCarty flushed the ball in the opening round at the Korn Ferry Tour’s Pinnacle Bank Championship presented by Woodhouse, three starts after his breakthrough win, but struggled on the greens in a pedestrian 2-under 69. That evening, Williams shared an anecdote from one of Tiger Woods’ many major-championship win. After Woods struggled on the greens in the first round, he told the media afterward: “That’s not like me.” He putted well for the rest of the week and won the event.

In Omaha, McCarty closed with three consecutive 67s as conditions toughened to secure his second win in four starts.

“He takes a story like that and makes it his own,” Williams said. “‘(He thought), ‘If Tiger feels that way, then why can’t I? That’s not like me.’ Talk about a powerful way to frame it.”

Two weeks later, McCarty cruised to victory at the Albertsons Boise Open presented by Chevron to earn the rare Three-Victory Promotion. He was ready for the big stage.

McCarty remained on the Korn Ferry Tour a few more weeks to cement the No. 1 spot in the season-long standings, which comes with starts in the 2025 U.S. Open and THE PLAYERS Championship. A fifth-place finish at the Nationwide Children’s Hospital Championship in late September clinched that goal. With nothing left to accomplish on the Korn Ferry Tour, he was off to the PGA TOUR.

Two weeks later, Williams was watching Golf Channel’s driving-range coverage of the Sanderson Farms Championship, McCarty’s first PGA TOUR start as a member. Williams saw his student pull out his phone for a quick text. In a surreal moment for the longtime teacher, his phone lit up with a two-word message.

“I’m ready.”

At the Black Desert Championship a week later, McCarty proved it.