Of the 11 career top-10 finishes compiled by Corey Conners on the PGA Tour, five have come in his last 10 events, dating back to last October.
Currently, he’s tied for second in top 10 finishes on the PGA Tour and Conners has already set a personal single season high in that department, surpassing the four he had in 2018-2019, which included the big one, his breakthrough win at the Valero Texas Open.
Yet, Conners recent record isn’t all about quantity. It’s about quality, as well, with his last two top-10s being a third place finish at the Arnold Palmer Invitational and a seventh at the Players Championship.
He faces a different format and an elite field beginning on Wednesday with his first appearance at the World Golf Championships-Dell Technologies Match Play event in Austin, Tx.
“I think I’ve had a number of good finishes over the last six months or so and those have all been big confidence boosters to me,” said Conners.
“I’ve been really patient and a lot of good things have happened, so I definitely gained a lot of confidence and definitely have a lot of confidence right now going into a big event like this,” he said.
“I definitely have a lot of trust in my game, felt like I’ve done a lot of things well. I’ve continued to improve a lot of areas of my game and just kind of polishing things and the hard work’s paying off, so it’s great to see and I’m definitely excited and definitely feeling confident now in this event and looking ahead to the Masters as well,” said Conners.
When Conners makes the trip along Magnolia Lane in a couple of weeks, he’ll be returning to the scene of yet another quality finish, a tie for 10th at Augusta in November, where he tripped out of the gate with a 74, but came back with rounds of 65-71-69 to finish at nine under.
“I felt like I was playing well. I got off to a poor start there, so it was really great to battle back and, ultimately, finish in the top 10. It definitely was a highlight and hopefully, I can keep building off of that and get myself more chances in the coming weeks,” said Conners.
This week, he plans to draw on his experience at the U.S. Amateur, where he was runner-up in 2014 and a semi-finalist the year before.
“As far as the format, we don’t play a lot of match play on tour, obviously, so I’ll have to remember some of the good memories in the U.S. Amateurs that I played and playing match play in amateur golf, I feel like I’ve had a lot of success in that format and I’m really excited to put myself to the test this week and hopefully, I can win some matches,” he said.
“It’s a different game, different beast. I think the top players would still do really well at match play. You’ve got to get the ball in the hole as quickly as possible. I think from my experience in the past, it favours steady players, where if you don’t make a lot of mistakes, you don’t give away any holes, I think that’s definitely going to be important,” he said.
Conners won’t get noticed for monster drives, but is steady tee to green. He has hit 69.51 per cent of fairways, leaving him 12th in tour driving accuracy. His 71.33 greens in regulation percentage is 15th to date, while his 70.087 scoring average is 17th,
“it’s a grind,” he said of match play.
“If you make a crazy par or crazy up-and-down par or something like that and end up halving a hole, that can be a really big momentum boost for you and can put your opponent down a little bit as well,” he said.
Conners and Matthew Wolff tee off at 11:53 a.m.local time on Wednesday. Mackenzie Hughes will tee it up at 2:05 p.m. local time against Paul Casey.
