Adam Hadwin is teeing it up in this week, hoping to start his 2026 season on a high note.<\/p>\n
While the scenery is beautiful and the course challenging, it\u2019s not exactly where he thought he\u2019d be in late January. <\/p>\n
Instead of playing the PGA Tour event at Torrey Pines, facing the world\u2019s best players, he\u2019s in Panama, playing on the Korn Ferry Tour against a wealth of young talent and as well as veterans who, like him, are trying to find their way back to the PGA Tour.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the first time in 11 seasons that Hadwin hasn\u2019t had full status on the top circuit. It comes after a disastrous 2025 that saw him log just one top-10 finish in 29 starts.<\/p>\n
\u201cAn extremely frustrating year overall,\u201d summed up Hadwin.<\/p>\n
The Abbotsford, B.C., product isn\u2019t used to struggling, at least not for an entire season. Since earning his Tour card in 2015, Hadwin has never been in danger of losing his playing privileges, with his best finish on the FedEx Cup standings being 26th and lowest 107th.<\/p>\n
More often than not, he was vying for a spot in the Tour Championship rather than trying to hang on to his card.<\/p>\n
But last year, he ended up 136th. The drop came at a bad time. The PGA Tour reduced the number of full exemptions to 100 from 125, meaning a lot of talented golfers were on the outside looking in.<\/p>\n
Hadwin\u2019s troubles started early in the 2025 season. The previous fall, he worked hard with his coach, Mark Blackburn, to shore up some of the weak parts of his swing, mainly getting the clubface square at impact. It felt great on the range and he was looking forward to another solid year. But the changes didn\u2019t transfer onto the course. When play returned, Hadwin\u2019s game didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought what we had worked on in the off-season was there and that I was doing good things,\u201d said Hadwin. \u201cNow, maybe some of the things on the golf course weren\u2019t being executed, but I\u2019m not sure that was in Mark\u2019s department, per se. Mentally, I just wasn\u2019t able to do it and I grew frustrated. Even with a golf swing in a good place, mentally I wasn\u2019t strong enough to be able to handle the adversity of my errors.\u201d<\/p>\n
His play wasn\u2019t all terrible; it was just that his bad swings were at inopportune moments. A good first round was followed by a poor second, or vice versa, and the result was a missed cut.<\/p>\n
After a tie for ninth at the WM Phoenix Open, which would be his lone top 10 of the season, he fired an 83 in the first round of the Genesis. He rectified matters in the second round with a 71 but it was still a missed cut. Two weeks later, at the Players, it was in reverse order \u2013 a solid 69 was wasted with a 77 on Friday and the weekend off.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was in quicksand,\u201d stated the 38-year-old. \u201cThe harder that I tried to get out of it, the worse I got. And the more frustrated I got, the more down on myself I became. You add those all up, and at some point, I had no confidence in what I was doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
That frustration bubbled up at the Valspar Championship when Hadwin, after a flubbed wedge shot, took out his frustrations on a sprinkler head, smashing it with his club and releasing jets of water. Despite his best attempts, he was unable to stop the flow. A week later, an embarrassed Hadwin paid for the repair and also bought the entire greens department lunch.<\/p>\n
As the season went on, the problem with his swing lessened but the one in his head grew. At many tournaments, he stood on the first tee on Thursday defeated before his first swing. Week after week, his place on the FedEx Cup standings fell and the fear of losing his privileges on the PGA Tour increased.<\/p>\n
\u201cInstead of picturing what could be and the good things that could happen, I was waiting for the bad things to happen,\u201d admitted Hadwin. \u201cThat\u2019s just not a place that you can play from consistently. So now I find myself in a very unfamiliar position this year.\u201d<\/p>\n
There was one bright spot that came from these depths. He reached out to another Canadian pro from years gone by, Richard Zokol, the veteran who played on the tour for more than 20 years. <\/p>\n
Always one who believed in the power of the mental game, he created an app that assists golfers with switching their minds away from the results of a shot and into the mental facets of the swing. Concentrate less on where the ball ended up and more on what you were thinking when you hit it.<\/p>\n
Hadwin utilized it to bring attention to what was going on between the ears during a shot. It was a welcome wake-up call but it was a bit too late to save his year. He stumbled through the Fall series with one highlight being a tie for 11th at the Bermuda Butterfield Championship. His last gasp at the PGA Tour Qualifying School left him on the outside looking in.<\/p>\n
Although he wasn\u2019t off for too long, it did let him reflect and regroup. He has stepped back from the frustration and the negative thinking, starting off 2026 with positivity. He will also start with a new caddie, having parted ways with long-time bagman Joe Cruz. Mike Darby, a fellow Canadian and friend, is taking over and is on the bag this week in Panama.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m optimistic that things are going to go well and that I\u2019m going to play well and get back to the tour,\u201d he said. \u201cI think that I still have a lot of good golf in front of me.\u201d<\/p>\n
He\u2019s also realistic. At 38, he\u2019s getting older in a league that is getting progressively younger.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have no illusions,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s going to be easy. The competition out there has continually gotten better over the years and gets stronger every year.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most of his play will be on the Korn Ferry Tour but he\u2019s expecting to get at least six or seven starts on the PGA Tour. Valspar has already offered him one as a past champion and he will also be in the field at the RBC Canadian Open.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the end of the day, good golf will take care of a lot of things,\u201d Hadwin said. \u201cI\u2019ve said that my entire career and it\u2019s really sort of time to get back to that focus and maybe have some fun out there for a change.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the very least, this will humble me a little bit and bring me back, back down to reality, and, if nothing else, probably show me whether I truly want it or not, and whether I want to keep going with the game.\u201d<\/p>\n
For now, it\u2019s full speed ahead, starting this week in Panama.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Adam Hadwin is teeing it up in this week, hoping to start his 2026 season on a high…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":446166,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[443],"tags":[712,49,48,622,98961,98962,86969,82],"class_list":["post-446165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-apple-news","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-golf","tag-golf-sports-golf","tag-korn-ferry-tour-sports-golf-korn-ferry-tour","tag-pga-tour-sports-golf-pga-tour","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=446165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446165\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/446166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=446165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=446165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=446165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}