LAKE COUNTY — Former Middletown High School golfing standout Doug Quinones of Hidden Valley Lake just missed the 72-hole cut Monday at the European PGA Tour’s Qualifying Tournament in Spain.
After three rounds of play, Quinones was three shots off the cut line. He needed a strong round Monday to finish among the low 70 golfers and continue on to the fifth and sixth rounds of Q School Tuesday and Wednesday.
After three rounds and 54 holes, Quinones was in 111th place out of 156 golfers following rounds of 76-71-68. He opened play Monday over the back nine of the Hills Course at the Lumine Golf Club just outside of Barcelona. Quinones recorded birdies on the 12th, 16th and 18th holes to make the turn at 3-under-par 33. Preliminary indications were that the cut line would stand at 4-under-par, meaing that Quinones would need to shoot 2-under-par over the course of his final nine holes to get within the top 70 and ties.
Quinones stumbled with bogeys on the second and third holes, then righted the ship with consecutive birdies on the fourth, fifth, and sixth holes. Standing at 4-under-par for the day and at 3-under-par aggregate for 69 holes, Quinones need one more birdie over the course of his final three holes to get inside the cut line. Instead, he bogeyed the seventh hole and then bogeyed the ninth hole, his final hole of the day. He ended up shooting 1-over-par 37 on his second nine and carded a 2-under-par 70 for the day.
Quinones’ four-day total of 76-71-68-70 penciled out to a 1-under-par 285. He ended up tied for 91st place, missing the cut by three strokes.
The low 70 and ties have two more rounds of competition ahead of them at Lumine Golf Club. The low 25 earn fully exempt status on the European PGA Tour. Those golfers who make the cut but fail to finish within the low 25 will become fully exempt members of the European Challenge Tour, a secondary 24-tournament circuit under the umbrella of the European PGA Tour.
Quinones will have conditional status on the Challenge Tour along with those other professionals who also failed to make the 7-hole cut.
Through four rounds, Denmark’s Benjamin Poke was the leader at 16-under-par. The line for the top 25 currently stands at 8-under-par 278
