Lacrosse was Johnny Keefer’s gateway into his eventual career – even if he didn’t realize it at the time.

A younger Keefer envisioned a life as a lacrosse player, and when his dad, John, wanted him to start taking golf lessons around age 11 (knowing it would be a great skill for the business world), he wasn’t easily convinced. So the elder Keefer had a proposition: If his son would take some golf lessons, he would buy him some new lacrosse equipment.

It worked, to a greater extent than father or son could’ve ever imagined. Keefer took those lessons, living in San Diego at the time, and quickly fell in love with the game. When the family moved from San Diego to Texas shortly thereafter, the golf scene was more robust than the lacrosse scene, and Keefer’s focus shifted further from lacrosse to golf.

Those golf lessons have now given way to a PGA TOUR card.

Keefer was declared #TOURBound after winning the NV5 Invitational, becoming the second player to clinch a 2026 PGA TOUR card via the Korn Ferry Tour season-long standings. It’s a benchmark moment in a rapid rise for Keefer, who finished atop the PGA TOUR Americas’ season-long Fortinet Cup in 2024 to earn Korn Ferry Tour membership – and has quickly made a mark in his rookie Korn Ferry Tour season with two victories and two second-place finishes among 10 top 25s in just 16 starts. He stands No. 1 on the season-long standings with seven events remaining; the top 20 after the season-ending Korn Ferry Tour Championship presented by United Leasing & Finance will earn PGA TOUR cards.

Perhaps in homage to his lacrosse years, Keefer still doesn’t really consider himself a golfer, he has said throughout the year. Nonetheless, he’s headed to the PGA TOUR.

Keefer’s arc to the game’s highest level might’ve looked smooth on paper, but as is often the case in this world, there were a few bumps in the road.

Years after his dad’s pivotal lacrosse-for-golf exchange, Keefer reached another seminal moment at the 2024 NCAA Championship (remarkably, just over a year ago). Keefer, then a fifth-year senior at Baylor, entered his final collegiate event at No. 29 on the PGA TOUR University Ranking, needing to move inside the top 25 to qualify for that summer’s North American Swing on PGA TOUR Americas. As he understood it, he needed roughly a top-10 finish at NCAAs to move inside the top 25, otherwise, he was headed to PGA TOUR Americas Q-School in California. And if things didn’t work out there, he would embark on an uncertain schedule for his first summer as a pro.

Keefer played well at NCAAs, finishing T11 – a result that he figured was just short of what he needed. But then, as he sat around the dinner table with teammates and family, he received a notification that he had moved into the 25th spot. It was a two-fold sigh of relief – knowing he had a place to play and escaping the pressure cooker of Q-School.

If Keefer needed a bit of a learning curve in his nascent days as a pro, he didn’t show it. In just 10 starts on PGA TOUR Americas, he notched nine top-10 finishes, including a win and four second-place showings. He finished atop the season-long standings, earning a full Korn Ferry Tour card for 2025 with a mind-bending scoring average of 66. His rookie Korn Ferry Tour season has featured more of the same (he held a 68.13 scoring average into the NV5 Invitational, where he improved it with a four-round total of 26-under 258 at The Glen Club). He qualified for the PGA Championship via the top 100 on the Official World Golf Ranking, and he survived a 7-for-1 playoff to qualify for the U.S. Open at Oakmont via Final Qualifying.

This laundry list of accolades would indicate that Keefer’s early success as a pro was inevitable, but rewind a couple of years, and you’d see that isn’t true. After a successful junior season at Baylor, Keefer hit a wall in his fourth season. The swing didn’t come easily. He tried to practice harder to compensate, but his body wasn’t used to hitting six or seven hours of golf balls on a near-daily basis, and he started to feel worn down. Eventually, after a few hard conversations with his close circle, he made a conscious decision to do better at separating golf and life. His scores didn’t define him; he had plenty else going for him – and if golf eventually didn’t work out, that was OK, too.

That attitude adjustment freed him up for a bounce-back season as a fifth-year senior – and one of the more meteoric rises through the PGA TOUR pathways ranks in recent memory.

Although Keefer is a dynamite athlete (the twisting and turning of lacrosse has bolstered his ability to generate power off the tee, he said), he believes his strongest asset is his mind. This traces back to his younger years – he was a “latchkey kid,” said his mom Judy, and had no trouble figuring out things for himself while his parents traveled for work (they’re both longtime employees of Gilbane Building Co., a global building and real estate development firm, and have spent ample time abroad, namely in Mexico). Judy Keefer vividly remembers a conversation when her son, a second or third grader at the time, recounted a problem at school. She asked if she should reach out to his teacher or if he could handle the situation himself. Keefer said he could handle it himself.

An older Keefer has demonstrated these traits time and again – like when he fought through a slump as a fourth-year senior at Baylor, and when he arrived at his final collegiate event with an uncertain schedule in professional golf. He has faced every challenge with a resilient mindset, and although he might not consider himself a golfer, he will be a PGA TOUR player in 2026.