Guy and Wendy Leach purchased a golf course in western Wisconsin in 1998. The following year, they had a son and named him Tyler. The family lived across the street from the 12th tee of Spring Valley Golf Course, and its name was the same as that of a town of only 1,400 people. Tyler and his older sister, Taylor, spent about half the week at the nursery and the other half with Wendy, who works in the clubhouse. One day, Tyler discovered the practice green and never looked back.
“I could walk across the street and tee it up whenever I wanted,” Leach said. “I basically lived there. I didn’t spend much time at home.”
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Maybe you’ll find your PGA Tour dream. Spring Valley is a wooded public layout with no driving range, but Saturday morning play costs less than $30. But that’s not where any of that is expected to happen.
Still, Leach, now a 25-year-old Marquette University graduate, is on the verge of realizing his dreams. Leach’s PGA Tour Q School journey begins with pre-qualifying three stages and continues through this week’s final stage in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. There, Leach will be one of 176 players competing for a five-card spot on the PGA Tour.
Only one of them has the experience of trying to get a shot through a narrow hallway in the final nine innings at Spring Valley. Spring Valley’s tip-out is just 6,000 yards, but Leach warns of its difficulty. He was the Golden Eagles’ Big East Newcomer of the Year, but even there he couldn’t break a 7-under 65.
Leach says the pine tree “taught me how to hit straight.” And the lack of distance meant more actual golf, which taught Leach how to keep score. A skilled ball-striker who started his freshman year at Marquette, he rose to prominence as a sophomore, winning his first tournament and averaging 71.9 points in seven tournaments before the rest of the season was canceled due to the pandemic. He played five seasons with the Golden Eagles, earning All-Big East first-team honors twice and capping his career by helping Marquette win the Big East title and earn an NCAA regional berth.
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But even though Leach could flash the ball, his putting held him back late in college and into Leach’s professional career, which began two years ago.
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“You could say it was the yips,” Leach said, recalling his low point at the 2022 Wisconsin Amateur. He dropped more than 16 putts over the course of four rounds, more than the average number of putts on the PGA Tour, and still tied for sixth place. “It was pretty demoralizing,” he added.
The following summer, he turned professional anyway.
“My expectation was to put in some effort every day and start climbing the ladder,” Leach said. “When I first turned pro, I knew I wasn’t good enough, but I felt like if I kept working hard I could get there. I started to see some progress, but the one thing I was missing was my putter. I didn’t really understand it.”
It wasn’t for lack of trying, Leach tried just about everything. Lower your left hand. The hips and shoulders open and close. Strong grip, weak grip. Lots of face rotation, but none at all. The only place he didn’t go first was the long putter.
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“I was actually making fun of people who used broomsticks and armlocks,” Leach admitted. “I said, there’s no way I’m going to use it. I’m just going to putt traditionally and figure this out.”
Marquette head coach Steve Bailey praised Leach’s confidence, which Bailey calls his “X-factor.”
“Even when he wasn’t playing his best game in college, he had this superpower of being resilient in the face of adversity,” Bailey said. “Tyler has a unique way of getting around hurdles and never doubted his abilities.”
Leach’s stubbornness about the stroke finally subsided in June when his wife, Abby, told him about the broom: “It doesn’t hurt.” So Leach threw the center-shafted LAB Mezz.1 Max into his bag. It was his first time using a broom, and he missed out on the mini tour by nine people. He stuck with it, and it was good. Leach had a great run at the Minnesota State Open in July, scoring his first professional win.
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“When you have a great putting week, it’s like proving to yourself, ‘I’ve done this once, I can do it again,'” said Leach, who has made just two career PGA Tour sanctioned starts in Canada.
Through three stages of Q-School, Leach has taken more than 1 1/2 shots per round, which is about three shots better than his college average. He has medaled in two consecutive stages, including last week’s second stage in Tucson, Arizona. Leach started the final round three strokes out with a star pass and shot a 7-under 63, more than seven strokes higher than the field average for the day. Leach finished the round with seven birdies over the final nine holes.
“It was just one of those days where I blacked out,” Leach said. “You try not to think about anything. You knew a lot was at stake, but you felt so trapped.”
Leach was also one of two second-stage medalists from Marquette, out of five final-stage competitors who started in the preliminaries. Hunter Eichhorn shot 21 under in Savannah, Georgia, advancing to the final stage for the first time since turning pro in 2022. Eichhorn is from Kearney, Michigan, an even smaller town in the U.S. state of Michigan with fewer than 200 residents. He won six championships with the Golden Eagles and won the Big Ten Player of the Year award three times. He was also Leach’s roommate for three years and served as a groomsman at Leach’s wedding.
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The two buddies have already played several practice rounds together this week in hopes of becoming the first and second Marquette graduates to earn PGA Tour cards.
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“And neither player has ever had a swing coach,” Bailey said. “That’s a really great story.”
Leach, ranked 4,896th in the world, is willing to ponder the possibility of such a feat.
“I was in a pretty dark place with my putting, but it’s hard to be successful in professional golf if you don’t make putts, so it’s definitely a big accomplishment to crawl back out of there,” Leach said. “I struggled there for a couple of years, and I definitely had some doubts. But if I could finish in the top five, I would have overcome that hurdle and achieved my dream, which is amazing when you think about it.”
Leach’s parents recently sold Spring Valley, but it will always be home, and its practice green is the beginning of a dream that will finally come true in the coming days.
