Kyle Westmoreland arrived at the final hole of his first round at Final Stage of the Korn Ferry Tour Qualifying Tournament at 2-over-par, licking his chops at the prospects of how well his fade set up on the left-to-right dogleg that had water down the right side. He was hoping to get into the house at 1- or 2-over and not shoot his way out of the tournament with three days of difficult conditions ahead.

Instead, he overcut his tee shot, lost it in the drink and had to drop 50 yards ahead. On his next shot with an iron, he did the same. He ended up finishing with a quadruple-bogey 8 on the par-4 and left rattled to sign an opening round, 6-over 76.

The Air Force graduate, who spent five years in the military before turning pro and kept his game sharp at a lighted driving range near his base in Charleston, South Carolina, may have been down, but he certainly wasn’t out. Instead, he hit the range to correct the right miss he’d been hitting and proceeded to rally with closing rounds of 69-67-67 to finish T19 for eight guaranteed starts on the Korn Ferry Tour in 2022.

“I had a right miss the first day and 20 of the 28 holes on the two courses moved right-to-left there, so a right miss was not ideal,” Westmoreland said. “I worked to correct it over the next couple days, got better and made some putts. Did what you needed to do at Q-School. It’s a lot of fun right? That’s why you play golf, to get the adrenaline flowing, and I thought it was a lot of fun and I enjoyed it.”

The fact that Westmoreland was even missing to the right to begin with shows the grind and work he’s put in to get to this point. Throughout high school and college, he hit a big hook, but he’s worked on it since turning pro in 2019.

“He used to play a big swooping hook. It was a big draw, and he would play over trees to draw it back to the middle of the fairway,” Westmoreland’s dad Don said. “Now, he plays a fairly straight shot or even a little bit of a fade. So, his whole game has totally changed.”

The big change to a fade, which he’s been working on with his coach Jeff Smith, who also coaches Viktor Hovland, largely came from a need to reign in the driver. Chris Wilson, who was the associate head coach at Air Force when Westmoreland was there and remains a close personal friend, used to joke that when Westmoreland was a freshman, he should “have been working with SkyCaddie because we were everywhere on the golf course with the places he played from when I walked with him.”

Westmoreland asked his agent, Brad Buffoni, for the best coach to help him shallow out his swing, a change he knew he needed to make. Buffoni suggested Smith, and the two have meshed well from the beginning. At Smith’s direction, Westmoreland even kept playing in events while instituting the changes.

“I was always a little bit more vertical with my swing, then I shallowed it late, so we got it very shallow early now,” Westmoreland said. “We really have improved my driving, which is what everything boils to. We have a lot of speed, but unless you’re hitting fairways, that speed doesn’t matter that much.”

As others have chased more speed, Westmoreland has so much of it that he has actually taken the reverse course and toned it down. He is working to ramp it back up, though, as he has gotten more confident in his swing changes.

Since Wilson first met him as a wide-eyed freshman at Air Force, the speed has always been world-class, and he rarely needs all the gas he’s got in the tank. Wilson even recalled the duo looking at outlandishly deep lines in the practice round at the 2021 U.S. Open at Torrey Pines, then laughing when he saw Bryson DeChambeau discussing similar lines later that day on Golf Channel.

“Coming out of college, I thought he was as long as anyone on the PGA TOUR,” Wilson said. “He’s done a phenomenal job of reigning the driver in, but he’s one of the few guys that I’ve ever seen that plays with like an 80 percent driver. He just has so much speed, he’s able to throttle it back. Then every now and then, you see a hole and you’re like, 'He’s going to hit this 400 yards.' That’s obviously his advantage, but he’s improved his putting tremendously from college and his wedges have improved as well.”

The results are obvious. He not only advanced through Korn Ferry Tour Q-School for the first time this year to secure guaranteed starts, but he also qualified for the 2021 U.S. Open and made the cut there with a T68 as the first Air Force graduate to ever play in the U.S. Open. For the first time since he got out of the military, he’ll have a set schedule this season. Although he’s 30, he’s only been a pro for three years and one of them was a COVID year, which felt like another year of waiting for him. So, he’s elated at the ability to not only plan his schedule for 2022 but make up for the lost reps he didn’t get in the five years where his first duty was serving the United States over his professional ambitions.

“Granted it’s eight tournaments on the Korn Ferry Tour, but that’s awesome,” Westmoreland said. “I’ve played that Forme Tour series, but I haven’t really had a solid schedule to be made. So, we’re super excited. We’re all excited to be able to have a place to play and more importantly, the goal is to be able to compete at the highest level on the PGA TOUR, and the Korn Ferry Tour is the best way to get there. We’re excited to be able to throw our hat into the ring and be able to try to work towards that goal this year.”

If there’s anyone that fans should be pulling for when the Korn Ferry Tour’s 2022 season kicks off Sunday at The Bahamas Great Exuma Classic at Sandals Emerald Bay, Wilson says it’s certainly Westmoreland – a patriot with huge game and even more character.

“The kid works so hard. He’s such a good person, and he’s so easy to cheer for,” Wilson said. “I’m probably biased, but I think America wants to see Kyle Westmoreland out there on the PGA TOUR and they should! He’s such a good kid, and I feel very fortunate that I’ve been able to have any part of his life, and I can’t wait to see what this year does for him.”