Club pro who clinched PGA Tour Champions card plans to keep his day job

In what may be the year’s unlikeliest story, 52-year-old club pro Jason Caron just clinched a coveted 2025 PGA Tour Champions tour card after playing only nine events.

At the start of the senior tour’s two-tournament playoff series, Padraig Harrington described the PGA Tour Champions circuit as “the hardest tour to keep your card in the world,” with only the top 36 players receiving fully-exempt status for the following year.

On a tour that includes legends and Hall of Famers like Harrington, Vijay Singh, Bernhard Langer, Retief Goosen and more, jostling your way into their company is a tough ask for any player. But Caron, who played on the PGA and Korn Ferry Tours in the early 2000s and has been working as a club pro at New York’s Mill River Club for the last decade, achieved the unthinkable over the weekend with a T3 finish at the Simmons Bank Championship in Arkansas, which was enough to launch him to No. 35 on the Charles Schwab Cup points list.

“I’m like speechless really, to be honest,” Caron said after his final-round 68, which featured birdies on three of his last five holes. “I didn’t have like — you know, it’s just weird to think that I could even get to here. I don’t even know what to say.

“I’m in disbelief, to be honest.”

While it’s not uncommon for club pros to earn their way on to the PGA Tour Champions via Q-School — Caron’s fellow Met-section pro Rob Labritz earned his card with a Q-School win in 2021 — Caron’s rise is particularly remarkable, because he worked his way into the playoffs event by event:

-T4 at the Senior PGA Championship in May (earned entry via qualifer)
-T31 at the American Family Insurance Championship in June (got into field as alternate)
-MC at U.S. Senior Open in June (earned entry via local qualifer)
-T3 at Rogers Charity Classic in August (got into field as alternate)
-T47 at Ally Challenge in August (got into field with previous week’s finish)
-T4 at Constellation Furyk & Friends (sponsor’s exemption)
-T47 at SAS Championship (got into field with previous week’s finish)
-T26 at Dominion Energy Charity Classic (first PGA Tour Champions playoff event)
-T3 at Simmons Bank Championship (got into 54-player field as No. 53 on points list)

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In nine events, Caron finished T4 or better an incredible four times. This past weekend, he had to finish T3 or better at the Simmons Bank Championship to launch himself from No. 53 on the points list into the top 36 — and he did it, landing at No. 35. That means he not only gets into next week’s PGA Tour Champions’ season finale, the Charles Schwab Cup Championship at Phoenix Country Club, but he also gets a fully-exempt PGA Tour Champions card for 2025.

But unlike his card-holding peers, Caron says he has no intention of giving up his day job at Mill River Club to play the tour full-time.

“I’m still going to be working, I’m not going to be full time and every single week,” Caron said on Sunday. “I’ll definitely play. I don’t see why not that we couldn’t work things out. I know Mill River’s going to be super excited for this.

“At work it’s going to be a lot easier for me now to sit down with them and I can actually tell ’em, like listen, I can play any event. So you tell me when you’re going to have your events and we’ll make it happen.”

Mill River’s winter closure will also work in Caron’s favor, opening up his schedule during the early part of the year.

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“In a dream world I think I’d play up to April, right, then we’re back to work,” he said. “I’ll be around. I would play hopefully the PGA, obviously we had a good tournament there this year. Then I was mentioning it to someone else, they said you’re probably going to get into the majors potentially. I don’t know which ones. So those are the ones I would focus on until the end of August. End of August my schedule frees up again, so I would be able to play more.”

At Mill River, Caron works alongside his wife, Liz, a former LPGA Tour pro. The couple shares two young daughters, and Caron said that his family is always top of mind.

“Like I said at the very beginning, chasing the white golf ball down the fairway’s not my first priority, my kids are,” he said.

Caron’s 2024 senior tour journey will come to an end in Phoenix next week, where there is a $1 million bonus up for grabs. But for the first time, a full schedule awaits in 2025.

“I’m not going to say I didn’t want this to happen, but I just didn’t think it could ever happen,” he said. “Obviously I mean top 36, like this is ridiculous, it really is.”