Collin Morikawa has had a busy year. He played more than 20 PGA Tour events this season, closing out a three-week FedEx Cup playoffs run that ended in a tie for 14th at the Tour Championship. That kind of workload adds up fast, even for a two-time major champion who has played at the highest level since 2019. Naturally, one wonders how Morikawa stays active without burning out. For one, Morikawa leans on a ritual that helps him escape constant pressure. Interestingly, it starts long before he steps foot on the course.

In a PGA Tour feature on his preparation, Morikawa explained his pre-tee time routine.

“Those are sometimes just a really fine line out here, but to separate sometimes, you know, winning a tournament or not. It’s a funny thing when you think about preparation because you truly never know how everything’s going to play out. You always get a different lie. You know, no two shots are ever the same. That’s what makes golf so great,” Morikawa said.

The comments were part of the same PGA Tour sit-down on his preparation, where Morikawa moved from describing golf’s unpredictability to explaining why he relies on set routines.

“There’s a fine line between superstition and rituals. I like to think of them as rituals and routines that allow me to say, ‘Okay, now I’m ready to go off and play golf.’ We don’t just show up to the golf course. I mean, I wish I could just show up and start hitting golf balls, but there’s a lot of prep that goes into it. The biggest routine for me is to make sure I show up about two and a half hours early,” he added.

Morikawa is obsessively time-oriented, arriving exactly two and a half hours before every tee time, every single day. He starts that window with nutrition and physio: stretching, hydration, and warm-up work with his PT. As he admits, a run of close to five hours can make players dehydrated, which can play them down mentally as much as physically.

Next, he moves to the putting green, chipping green, and range, usually an hour before tee time, where precision kicks in. For instance, he starts every range session with six balls on 30-yard chip shots. Five, though, is his favorite number.

“Five is my favorite number. Number five, golf ball. Whenever I can have that sense around me, it just feels a little more comfortable for me to go out there and do what I do,” he explained.

Interestingly, before every opening shot, he runs through one checkpoint, more like a ritual: 14 clubs in the bag; five tees in his right pocket; a marker and pencil in his left; yardage book in his back pocket.

However, he’s quick to clear that none of this is about luck. It’s about keeping a steady baseline through a season that only gets harder as it goes. That is especially true in playoffs, when a full year of results collides with three weeks of pressure golf in a row.

“When you get to playoffs, and you look back at the entirety of the season, you’re drained,” he said.

He manages the stress the same low-key way: small snacks on the course, a bar around the ninth hole. It’s the same pre-round sequence every day, which is exactly why the stakes never seem to rattle him.

That showed up at the Tour Championship this year. He opened with rounds of 64 and 67 and sat inside the top three at the halfway point, then a bogey-double-bogey stretch on Saturday knocked him out of contention. Strip out that one round and the week was actually good, 14 birdies, three bogeys. Season over $10 million, world No. 10.

He’s tinkered before, too. Winless in 2024, he showed up to the 2025 Sentry doing something new before iron shots: opening his lead hip, driving the right knee at the ball. Snead used to do it. It wasn’t a short-term experiment either.

“It’s been working, which has been nice,” Morikawa said. “It wasn’t a two-day thing and then throw it in the trash.”

Other PGA Tour Pro Lean on a Routine

Moreover, Morikawa isn’t alone in leaning on a repetitive routine to survive a long season. Scottie Scheffler, the world’s top-ranked player for most part of two years, has said his own routine looks almost identical in structure.

Scheffler has described sticking to a consistent warm-up and mental approach before every round, regardless of the tournament or the stakes.

“I just always get excited to come out, play and whatnot, and that’s usually enough for me to give it my best effort,” Scheffler told reporters back in 2022, heading into a Genesis Invitational. He’s stuck with that same low-key approach ever since.

Other players cope with the grind in their own ways, but the underlying strain is the same. Sports psychologist Julie Elion, who works with PGA Tour players, told the Golf Subpar podcast that managing a season’s worth of expectations is often harder than managing a single round. Ben Griffin and J.J. Spaun, she noted, are both dealing with exactly that after big 2025 seasons raised the bar for what comes next.

But for Morikawa, it keeps coming back to the same two and a half hours, week after week.