It’s Q-School season, and several players competing in the FedExCup Fall – which resumes at this week’s World Wide Technology Championship – are fighting across the next three weeks to maintain their PGA TOUR status and avoid a return to Q-School.

PGA TOUR rookie Quade Cummins is one of those players, and like so many of his peers, he has a memorable Q-School story.

For an up-and-coming pro like Cummins in 2021, Second Stage of PGA TOUR Q-School presented by Korn Ferry represents the ultimate crucible. Advance and secure some status on the Korn Ferry Tour. Miss and face an uncertain playing schedule for the following year, with no status anywhere. It’s as nervy a scenario as professional golf offers. Cummins finished his final round in Albuquerque, New Mexico, well ahead of the final groups, with a tedious position inside the cut line. Rather than wait around a couple of hours to learn his fate, he decided to hit the road for the eight-hour drive home to Oklahoma – since the top 19 and ties advanced, there was no possibility of a playoff.

This was no ordinary drive, though. Cummins had a crucial task awaiting upon his return home: picking up the engagement ring for his then-fiancée, now-wife Rian. Falling short at Q-School wouldn’t have diluted the event’s magnitude, of course, but advancing would certainly not hinder the cause.

Cummins spent the first two hours of his drive refreshing the leaderboard. The cut line moved as the final groups came in, and he cemented his first Korn Ferry Tour card. He proceeded to collect the ring, and Rian eventually said yes to a proposal at Oak Tree National outside of Oklahoma City, the couple’s now-adopted home community.

Not all good things stem from a Q-School story, but this one fit the bill.

“I took off after Second Stage was over because … I felt like I was going to miss, and I knew I had to pick this ring up,” Cummins said. “It was … the last guys to finish that got me in, and the rest of that drive, I was pretty excited to go pick the ring up. I picked the ring up, and I proposed that next weekend.”

Although there’s no ring involved this time, Cummins faces a similar crucible across the next few weeks in his fight to maintain PGA TOUR status. The small-town Oklahoma native arrives in Mexico at No. 153 on the FedExCup Fall standings, just four points shy of the top 150 to maintain conditional TOUR membership for 2026. There are varying benchmarks to chase, with the top 100 after The RSM Classic (the FedExCup Fall’s final event) earning exempt status on the 2026 PGA TOUR, and higher levels of conditional status available at the No. 110 and No. 125 cutoff points.

Cummins is a self-described golf obsessive who was at the course with his dad and grandpa (in a cart) before he could walk, and he relishes the challenge. He has already come a long way from his hometown of Weatherford, Oklahoma (population: 12,047), which has just one golf course, Prairie West GC, where he would sometimes play 10 balls on a single hole to practice different shots. Cummins didn’t care too much for schoolwork, he freely admits (aside from shop and home economics classes), but he penned a memorable essay as a high schooler where he outlined three goals: win a state title in high school, play college golf, and earn his TOUR card. Cummins achieved that final goal last autumn, finishing No. 11 on the season-long Korn Ferry Tour Points List to earn his card – and he intends to keep that card across the next three weeks.

“I still have that paper,” said Cummins’ mom Stacy. “I thought, ‘Wow, those are big goals.’ I kept Quade’s paper and all those things came true. I sent a copy to his English teacher and said, ‘Look what he did.’ I sent a copy to his college coach who recruited him.

“That was his goal, to get a PGA TOUR card, and here we are.”

Although he’s a rookie at the game’s highest level, Cummins isn’t fazed by those with more experience. A younger Cummins was always around older kids and adults, whether at the golf course or at his family’s car dealership, Cummins Auto Group, where he considered the salespeople his best friends (he never needed a babysitter, his mom laughs now). Cummins was the ringleader of frequent games around the dealership – one day it might be the quarter toss, another it might be a putting competition – and from a young age, it became common knowledge that if he wasn’t at the dealership during a summer vacation, he was probably at the golf course.

During off-peak months, Cummins played other sports to stay in shape – he played soccer as an elementary schooler before progressing to football (where he played both center and kicker), and he played basketball up until his senior year of high school when he broke a finger while dunking. But his north star was golf. Although there weren’t TOUR pros from his hometown to emulate, he cultivated competitive experience by challenging members on the golf team at Weatherford’s Division II college, Southwestern Oklahoma State University. At first, Cummins would just watch the team practice, he remembers, before they eventually welcomed him to join for nine holes and eventually a qualifying round. He progressed to the University of Oklahoma, where he honed his game for six years – redshirting as a freshman and then taking advantage of a fifth competitive season per COVID-era rules. He finished No. 6 on the inaugural PGA TOUR University Ranking in 2021, one spot shy of a Korn Ferry Tour card at the time, but he relished the professional experience on the Forme Tour (a COVID-era fill-in for PGA TOUR Americas), which gave way to that fateful week at Q-School in Albuquerque with a particularly important piece of jewelry on his mind. He steadily improved in his time on the Korn Ferry Tour, finishing 70th on the season-long standings in 2022, then 59th, then 11th.

Cummins might have taken the road less traveled, both physically and metaphorically speaking, but it got him to the PGA TOUR. Across the next three weeks, he will fight for his right to stay there.