This article originally appeared in the August issue of NCGA Golf Magazine
Fresno teen heads to college after standout junior career
By Adam Schupak
Ayden Fynaut’s first set of clubs were of the plastic Fisher Price variety that he used, crawling around the family’s house in Fresno smacking balls. One day, his father, Dan, came home from work to find a golf-ball-sized hole in their living room TV set. “And I walked in and I'm like, "What is that?” Dan recalls. “My wife said, ‘You're going to be so proud. He hit a ball right through there.’ ”
It wasn’t long before Fynaut was waking up at 5 a.m. to go hit balls outdoors before his father went to work, competing against him in chipping and putting competitions for a candy bar or a Gatorade. He still cherishes the first medal he won in the nine-hole Central Valley Junior in 2014.
“I fell in love with the game,” he says.
Fynaut, 18, has turned into one of the most promising young players in the region. Most recently, he was medalist at the NCGA Amateur. The No.1 seed had lost in the Round of 32 in four of the last five years but Fynaut bucked that trend and made it to the quarterfinals before bowing out.
After finishing second in the 2025 NCGA Junior Boys’ Player of the Year race, winning twice, Fynaut spent this summer gaining experience at elite amateur series events – Sunnehanna Amateur, Northeast Amateur Invitational, Western Amateur – with pedestrian results that served as a good smack in the face that there’s more work to be done. But at the Monroe Invitational, where he finished T-12, and North & South Amateur Championship, where he finished third, he proved his game can stack up at the highest level of amateur golf. In December, he won the prestigious Jones Cup Junior Invitational and added the Fresno City Amateur Championship in May, making birdie on half the holes in the final round.
That’s not the only evidence that Fynaut exhibits that extra gear to go low. Fynaut showed what he is capable of when he shot a final-round 63 at the NCGA Junior in 2024, to finish second. At last Fall’s Junior Tour of Northern California event at Micke Grove Golf Links in Lodi, he shot 65-64 to lap the field by six. Just a week earlier, he had looked up JTNC scoring records online and knew he’d be in the record books for low 36-hole score if he birdied 18. “I hit a 9 iron to 5 feet and drained it dead center,” he says.
Fynaut oozes confidence. His longtime swing coach Mike Schy, whose students have included Bryson DeChambeau and Asterisk Talley, called Fynaut’s self-talk second to none and said he possesses more self-belief “than anyone I’ve ever been around.”
Take, for instance, at the 2025 Junior Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass, Pete Dye’s house of horrors with the iconic island-green par-3 17th. Fynaut struggled in the first round, shooting 80 as he dealt with a shoulder injury that nearly forced him to withdraw. But afterwards, he and Schy worked on a Band-Aid fix to play around the injury. Fynaut found his groove and predicted to one reporter as he finished his range session that he would shoot 67 in the second round. Just a 13-stroke improvement on one of the toughest courses in the country, that's all. Lo and behold, Fynaut called his shot and signed for a smooth 67. It's not being cocky if you can back it up!
Fynaut is on the verge of starting his freshman year at Pepperdine University in Malibu, where he’ll keep trying to complete Schy’s tournament challenge of making no bogeys on the card. The reward? A hundred bucks. “He hasn’t done so yet,” Schy says.
But what Fynaut’s done so far in the game isn’t too shabby either — from the days of chipping for candy bars to busting TV sets — and the best may still be yet to come.