SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – When Scottie Scheffler rolled into the 2022 WM Phoenix Open, he was winless, albeit with a few close calls. He seemed to have a lot of potential, but that describes a ton of guys on the PGA TOUR.

Fast-forward to today and Scheffler, who beat Patrick Cantlay in a playoff at TPC Scottsdale last year, is himself a star, a four-time winner with a green jacket in his closet.

Like others before him, Scheffler found that one year, 12 little months, changed everything.

“People kind of know who I am now versus a year ago at this tournament,” said Scheffler, who has three top-10s in five starts this season, as well as a T11 at The American Express in his last start. “Maybe a few people (knew me) from the Ryder Cup, but definitely, going back to a year and a half ago before that, pretty much nobody.”

He has to be more judicious with his time these days, what with being pulled in multiple directions, but as he reminds himself, that’s a good problem to have. To be recognized means you’re doing it right, and it’s more fun, he adds, with fans cheering him on.

And yet Scheffler, whose rise was vertiginous and whose exploits made him the easy choice for Player of the Year, is only one of many players whose lives have been transformed by a 12-month heater. A poll in which PGATOUR.COM asked others about their own life-altering years showed they could relate, be they lesser-known journeymen, relatively new on TOUR, or bona fide stars. Asked about the most impactful year of their golfing lives, few needed even a moment to think.

“I mean, I went from being in college to being top 10 in the world in nine months from 2016 to 2017,” said nine-time PGA TOUR winner Jon Rahm, who could reclaim world No. 1 this week. Rahm shook his head at the recent memory. He tied for third in his professional debut in June 2016 at the Quicken Loans National at Congressional; got his first win at the Farmers Insurance Open in January 2017 and finished T2 at Colonial in May of that year.

Those results, plus a bunch of other top-10s, sent Rahm from Arizona State Sun Devil to ninth in the world.

“My next year wasn’t as good because the period of adaptation was too quick,” he said. “You can’t prep anybody for that, being in college, when nobody knows you exist, to being a star."

A year of transcendent golf was similarly life-altering for Justin Thomas. In 2017, he won the PGA Championship, Dell Technologies Championship, and THE CJ CUP @ NINE BRIDGES. The calendar turned and he won The Honda Classic and WGC-Bridgestone Invitational. He tied for sixth in his title defense at the 2018 PGA Championship.

“I would say PGA to PGA from 2017 to 2018 was probably the best golf I’ve played,” said Thomas, a 15-time PGA TOUR winner. “I think I won five, six times, something like that, I was in contention a lot. It changed my life. I wasn’t just viewed as Jordan’s friend anymore. I felt like I took my game to another level and was looked at differently by my peers.”

Although the ascents of Scheffler, Rahm and Thomas were so rocket-like they should have come with supplemental oxygen, transformative years aren’t limited to the elites.

“For me it would be 2016,” said Ireland’s Seamus Power, a two-time PGA TOUR winner. “It was the first time I won, I guess the only time I won, on the Korn Ferry Tour, and represented my country in the Olympics, and then started on the PGA TOUR. It was a big step up. It kind of changed everything for me.”

J.T. Poston said his most transformative year was last year. He got off to a slow start but hit the afterburners to qualify for the season-ending TOUR Championship for the first time. “It’s one of those small steps where you’re in all the majors, you’re in all the tournaments,” he said. “You can plan your schedule. Before, I had won, but I still wasn’t in all the majors.”

A handful of players cited a transformative year in college. At Stetson, a small school in Deland, Florida, sophomore Sam Ryder was knocking on the door in the fall, and then he won, which led to three more victories in the spring season. “I was like, OK, I have a chance to play (amongst the best collegiate players),” Ryder said. “But you have those at every level, and I’m kind of going through that at the PGA TOUR level.”

Stewart Cink was a 19-year-old college sophomore at Georgia Tech when his girlfriend, Lisa, called to say they were expecting. They got married, Lisa took a semester off, and they had their first child before they resumed their classes together in January of ’94. “Plenty of people said to me, ‘You might as well go ahead and quit,’” Cink said. But instead of doing that, he got hyper-efficient with his time, and watched himself, and his game, grow up fast.

Maverick McNealy also saluted his school days. “My first 12 months on the Stanford golf team,” he said. “It’s when I became a one-sport athlete – I played ice hockey – and was on the best team in the country and learning from great players and great people. I just said, everybody here does at least one thing better than I do, so I’m going to copy everything they do. I learned a lot.”

Davis Riley went back further than that, to the 2013 and ’14 U.S. Junior Amateurs – he finished second in both, to Scheffler and Will Zalatoris, respectively.

“That was the first time I’d played on TV or in front of crowds or anything,” Riley said, “and that gave me a lot of confidence as a young player and set the foundation for coming to the Korn Ferry Tour and the PGA TOUR and being comfortable with bigger stages. I was 15 and 16.”

Luke List said the year that changed everything for him was when he was 7, and his maternal grandfather, Robert Brown, taught him how to play golf in Jasper, Georgia.

“He wouldn’t let me ride in the cart until I hit it far enough to not just chase it, so that was my goal, to hit it far enough,” List said. “It must have been over 100 yards or something. I didn’t beat him until I was 12 or 13 years old; he would always chip in or make a putt on the last hole. I loved it. He’s still around. He’s 91.”

List’s 2022, when he captured his first PGA TOUR title at the Farmers Insurance Open, was pretty good, too.

To Ryder’s point, transformative years can happen more than once, and at every level. Brendon Todd, 37, reignited his career when he broke out of an epic slump and won twice in the fall in 2019, but he’s not resting on his laurels. He just finished T2 at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro Am and believes his most transformative year is still out ahead of him.

“The next 12 months are going to be the best of my life,” Todd said. “Write that down.”