South Africa’s three highest ranked golfers in the world are all 25 years and younger, which is a powerful statement of another highly successful Sunshine Tour season that draws to a close at the De Zalze Winelands Golf Estate this week with the DNi Tour Championship presented by RMB, the final tournament on the Courier Guy Playoffs.
This past season, Jayden Schaper (ranked 59th on the Official World Golf Ranking), Casey Jarvis (69) and Aldrich Potgieter (77) established themselves as a new generation of South African stars with breakout performances on the Sunshine Tour and abroad.
This week’s R3 million DNi Tour Championship presented by RMB will celebrate this as well as a season in which the Tour increased its prize money throughout its schedule, a host of new names graduated onto the HotelPlanner Tour and DP World Tour, and a new exemption was offered into The Masters alongside existing exemptions into The Open.
CASEY JARVIS
Jarvis won twice in three weeks on the Sunshine Tour in 2025 and then claimed the biggest victory of his career in front of a record crowd at the Investec South African Open in February this year. These performances, plus a runner-up finish in the Joburg Open, carried him into first place on the Courier Guy Order of Merit and he is well on track to ending the season as the Sunshine Tour No 1.
Schaper ended 2025 in dominant fashion with his back-to-back victories in the Alfred Dunhill Championship and the AfrAsia Bank Mauritius Open.
Both Schaper and Jarvis are also currently ranked within the top three on the DP World Tour’s Race to Dubai Rankings.
Potgieter broke through with his maiden PGA Tour title in 2025 before returning home for a top-10 finish in the Alfred Dunhill Championship.
Beyond this, the season started on a record-breaking note in May 2025.
Mexico’s Luis Carrera became the first player in Sunshine Tour history to win the Tour’s Qualifying School and then the first two tournaments of the season, and remains on track to be named the Fortress Rookie of the Year by the end of this week.
And Sunshine Tour professional JC Ritchie made further history this season when he became the first South African golfer in history to finish first on the HotelPlanner Tour’s Road to Mallorca Rankings at the end of 2025.
There will still be more to play for when the DNi Tour Championship presented by RMB tees off on Thursday, as the top performers seek to lock down global exemptions, cash bonuses and other incentives.
The winner of the Courier Guy Order of Merit earns a place in the Nedbank Golf Challenge in honour of Gary Player and two Majors, namely The PGA Championship and The Open.
The winner of the Fortress Rookie of the Year will earn a R400 000 bonus.
The leading player in the top 10 of the final Courier Guy Order of Merit who doesn’t already have status on the DP World Tour will earn a card for next season. The next two leading players will receive cards on the HotelPlanner Tour for next season.
The leading three players on the final Courier Guy Order of Merit will receive R500 000 (first place), R200 000 (second place) and R100 000 (third place) respectively.
The winner of the Courier Guy Order of Merit will receive an MSC international cruise, while players finishing second and third will each receive a five-day, four-night local cruise. And the top three Sunshine Tour professionals from the final Courier Guy Order of Merit will win a Hyundai for a year.
And both the winner of the Courier Guy Order of Merit and Fortress Rookie of the Year will receive automatic entry into the Waterfall City Tournament of Champions supported by Attacq and WCMC in June this year, where they will compete for a first prize of R1 million.