Schaper moves inside SA’s top 20 in latest rankings

Dec 4, 2023 | Featured, Rankings

Jayden Schaper’s share of fifth in the Investec South African Open Championship at the weekend has seen him jump 52 places in the latest Official World Golf Ranking list issued on Monday to move inside South Africa’s top 20.

Schaper moved to 393^rd, making him the 18^th-best player in South Africa according to the increasingly controversial official list. While that is some way off his career-best of 274^th, achieved after his share of 20^th in the 2021 Kenya Savannah Classic, it’s the second time his home open championship has given him a nice leg-up on the rankings. When he shared sixth in the 2020 version of the event, he climbed from 2,074^th to 939^th in the tournament that announced his arrival on the professional stage.

In the other significant move from action in the SA Open, Dean Burmester reclaimed the top spot on the local rankings with his second victory in two weeks hoisting him atop the list. His absence from that position has been LIV-induced, and he climbed 29 spots thanks to his maiden national title to 77^th. He supplanted Thriston Lawrence at the top of the list, but is still some way off the 55^th place he was in at the beginning of the year.

The man who shared the runner-up spot in the SA Open, Ryan van Velzen (above), might not have made it into South Africa’s top 20 with his fine performance at Blair Atholl, but he had a huge leap of 181 places to 463^rd on the world list. That makes him the 24^th-best local player according to the rankings.

South Africa’s top 20: