PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla.

The leading 20 players on the Korn Ferry Tour secured their ticket to the big leagues and then had three days to celebrate before it was back to work.

The first stop was PGA Tour headquarters for two days of orientation, media training and an agenda that made them feel like college freshmen.

Blades Brown wouldn’t know about that. He turned pro when he was a junior in high school and now, at 19, is the youngest Korn Ferry Tour graduate in history.

With optimism running high, orientation was a chance to get a tiny glimpse of who some of them are.

• Hunter Eichhorn grew up in Carney, located in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, population 182 in the last U.S. Census. So what’s it like growing up in a one-stoplight town?

“We have one caution light, actually,” Eichhorn said.

He developed his game on Wisconsin’s junior circuit, and all those low scores got the attention of Marquette, where he won six times, broke numerous school scoring records and was All-Big East four of his five years. In his first year on the Korn Ferry, he had nine top-10 finishes to secure his PGA Tour card.

• Alvaro Ortiz made it to the Masters before his brother, Carlos, by winning the Latin American Amateur in 2019. It just took the 30-year-old from Mexico longer to reach the PGA Tour.

“I’ve always known I was going to make it,” he said. “Through the years, you’re starting to doubt. When is it going to happen? Is it going to happen? We’re in such a result-oriented business, you need to take a step back and see the year is not going so bad.”

He won twice on the Korn Ferry Tour this year, locking up his card in Tennessee. It was a test of patience. Ortiz stopped making changes based on results and trusted the game he had.

• Ross Steelman, who finished No. 1 in points this year, is sure to stand out because of the full sleeve of tattoos down his left arm. It took some 25 hours to complete. But it’s the nail polish that get equal attention: pastel purple on the pinkie and index fingers.

“My girlfriend got a new color of nail polish. I did it on one finger so she could see what it looked like on a person before doing it on her own,” he said. “And then I finished second that week. I’ve got to keep going now. And I won in Colorado.”

A week after his win, she noticed her nail chipping more on the index finger. Steelman was dubious so he did what he called “field testing” and painted that nail. He finished third in Chicago and a month later won again.

“So it’s going to stay until I stop playing well,” he said.

• Finding a turning point in a young career is not difficult for Ian Gilligan. He was a freshman in high school, sitting in the living room with his parents when his father told him Ian had cancer.

Gilligan was 15 when he was diagnosed with anaplastic large cell lymphoma, which is rare for teenagers but with a higher recovery rate.

“You hear about other people having it, and it seems like such a foreign thing until it happens to you,” Gilligan said. “And then it was like, ‘Whoa, this doesn’t seem real.’ But fortunately, I took it day-by-day. It helped that a lot of information was withheld from me. My parents were told about survival rates and all the scary things that could happen. I was just going through my day and doing it.”

Some seven months of chemotherapy worked wonders. Fourteen months after the diagnosis, Gilligan played his first Korn Ferry Tour event that he qualified for in a junior event.

He spent two years at Long Beach State, transferred to Florida and left the Gators as No. 4 on the PGA Tour University ranking. His mantra through the ordeal was “be kind, be present and keep moving forward.” Having a PGA Tour card takes on special meaning.