Manitoba's top golfer enjoying career year as he prepares for DP World Tour playoff debut

Aaron Cockerill has been carefully working away at his golf game like a master craftsman, just chipping away with a hammer and chisel.

As a result he's enjoying his best season as a professional golfer, and will play in the European-based DP World Tour's playoffs for the first time when the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship tees off on Thursday.

Reaching that elite tournament has been the product of incremental improvement year-over-year.

"My whole career has been like that, I've slowly improved," Cockerill said in a phone interview from his home in Dubai. "Whether it was an OK year on the Canadian Tour to a better year on the Canadian Tour, to moving over to the Challenge Tour, to getting on to the DP World Tour, and since then every year, I've gotten just steadily better.

"Nothing is really too drastically different, just slowly been chipping away."

Cockerill, from Stony Mountain, Man., played his first three DP World Tour events in 2019, finishing the year 261st in the Race to Dubai standings. He moved up to 118th in 2020, slipped back to 152nd in 2021, then rose to 107th in 2022, 76th in 2023 and now sits 47th in the rankings.

The top 50 golfers after the HSBC Championship will move on to next week's DP World Tour Championship in Dubai.

"I have basically two goals every year, and it's to win and to make the DP World Tour Championship, so I'm very close," said Cockerill, who recently moved his family to Dubai full time and is just a 55-minute drive from Yas Links where this week's event will be held. "I'm just looking to have a steady week, play well, and play my way into that one and just see what happens.

"I'm pretty familiar with the area in the courses, so I feel like I'm I get a little bit of an advantage there, but no