Korn Ferry Tour occasion to award exemption to major player in APGA Collegiate Ranking

A top Black university golfer will now get a sponsor exemption into a Korn Ferry Tour celebration.

UNC REX Healthcare, the title sponsor for the KFT’s REX Hospital Open up, declared Tuesday that it will reward the prime-rated player in the final APGA Collegiate Ranking, each this time and up coming, with a spot in Raleigh, North Carolina-based event. This year’s REX Clinic Open up will be played June 3-6 at The Place Club at Wakefield Plantation.

“We are very pleased to lover with the APGA to deliver an opportunity for a major collegiate golfer to compete in just one of North Carolina’s premiere golfing tournaments,” claimed Ernie Bovio, president of UNC REX Health care. “At UNC REX we have created a lifestyle of equity and inclusion, and continue to appear at ways to increase access to care for all people, particularly during the pandemic.”

The APGA Collegiate Ranking debuted last slide and is comprised of Black college or university golf seniors from NCAA Divisions I, II, and III, as properly as HBCUs. The top rated five players in the APGA Collegiate Ranking at the conclude of every year will get, in addition to a KFT exemption, entry into all remaining APGA Tour events that calendar year, travel charges involved with each APGA Tour celebration and an exemption into the pre-qualifying stage of that year’s Korn Ferry Tour Qualifying Tournament.

The new rating is designed to aid prime Black golfers changeover from the collegiate game into the specialist ranks.

“This commitment from UNC REX Health care and the Korn Ferry Tour is a major action for the APGA Collegiate Ranking and the APGA Tour’s mission of bringing increased variety to the activity,” stated Ken Bentley, co-founder and CEO of the APGA Tour. “These faculty players have major desires of earning it to the maximum degrees of skilled golfing and now they have a pathway to make that transpire.”

Lee Elder, who was each the 1st Black participant to compete in the Masters (1975) and on a U.S. Ryder Cup workforce (1979), said he was “so happy” to see this KFT exemption extended for each of the future two several years.

“This is going to make a huge distinction for these gamers,” Elder explained. “I imagine you’re likely to now see a lot more younger Black young children will now get started a job and that it is not heading to get them a extended time to arrive at the possible and things that they have established out for themselves. They can occur out with an attitude, that ‘I have a little something to do that is in my hands. That it is up to me to be capable to attain the purpose that I established for myself.’ The PGA TOUR is working tricky and striving to get items like this to materialize. The individuals that are concerned in this will unquestionably be working to attempt to make guaranteed that this will come about once again for other organizations. I will be carrying out regardless of what I can to support in any way that I can, and to put a voice out there to make positive that it is going in that path. I feel that a person thing the REX Medical center is undertaking is location a best case in point and I think that there will be others that absolutely follow them.”