Get to know Ryan Gerard, the Raleigh native who just won on the PGA Tour

Axios

3 days ago

It's been a great year for North Carolina golfers, especially for Raleigh native Ryan Gerard, who is coming off the first victory of his career at the Barracuda Championship earlier this month.
Why it matters: The PGA Tour is back in North Carolina this week at the Wyndham Championship in Greensboro, and the home state event is a reminder of the rising number of North Carolinians thriving on tour.
In addition to Gerard, Chapel Hill native Ben Griffin and Akshay Bhatia, who grew up in Wake Forest, are both in the Top 50 of the World Golf Rankings at the moment.
It's also a banner year for the UNC golf team, which now boasts three alums on tour with Gerard, Griffin and rookie David Ford.
Zoom in: Gerard, who is 25 and grew up playing at Wildwood Green Golf Club in Raleigh, is on his first full year on tour.
His recent win gives the Ravenscroft School alum a guaranteed PGA Tour card for the next two years.
Axios talked with Gerard about his win ahead of his appearance at the Wyndham. The Q&A has been edited for clarity and brevity.
What does getting a win on tour mean for you?
Once you win on tour, it frees you up for a couple of years to go out there and play golf and not have to worry about job security.
But at the same time, you don't want to get complacent. I think the goalpost kind of shifts. You don't want to be the one-time winner on the PGA Tour. You want to be the guy who's up there at the top of leader court every week.
Why do you think there are more Tar Heels on tour now?
I think it has a lot to do with the way the coaching staff, and coach Andrew DiBitetto, has bought into this kind of culture shift, making it so that it's more competitive in practice.
Getting a bunch of really good guys in the same room that push each other and want to compete day in and day out drives you to be the best.
Do you think changes in NIL will change that?
I'd be lying to you if I said I knew the answer. I know it's very hard to compete with SEC schools when it comes to NIL and their contracts with football are so big that they can kind of fund the rest of the university's athletics.
I think you're going to see a lot of success with SEC schools [in gold]. But I don't necessarily think it's going to put schools like UNC at a disadvantage, because we have a really, really great donor base.
What were your favorite courses to play growing up?
I played a course called Wildwood Green all the time growing up. It was a very good golf course to learn how to play golf on. There's a lot of character to the holes. The grass conditions were such that you had to be comfortable hitting from different spots, different lies and different angles.
Growing up, Chip Watson and Roger Watson, who just passed, owned Wildwood Green and general managed Lonnie Poole Golf Course at N.C. State. They have been fantastic to me my entire life, and they allowed me to come out to Lonnie Poole and practice and play.
Why has the Triangle started producing more professionals lately?
I think the golf courses in North Carolina prepare you to play a lot of different types of golf. You're playing on Bermuda grass, which goes dormant in the winter. If you can learn how to chip on that, it's probably the most difficult surface in the world to execute on.
From a weather standpoint, you can play golf nearly every day of the year, and there's a lot of character on the courses in the Triangle, with trees, bunkers and visually intimidating shots.
And I think when you get a bunch of guys who want to compete in the same area, see success from others and have the tools and resources to learn how to be a proper player, your game travels when you play national tournaments.
What are your go-to spots in Raleigh?
It's difficult. I live in Florida now for weather reasons, and I am home very rarely during the season.