PDGA rankings hold steady, Northwest Championship could shake standings
Silva Saarinen and Gannon Buhr stayed at No. 1, but the real pressure point is the swarm of movers just below them before Portland.
The top of the PDGA rankings did not budge on May 27, but the pressure beneath it did. Silva Saarinen held the FPO No. 1 spot and Gannon Buhr stayed atop MPO, even as a cluster of challengers tightened the race before the next points-counting stretch.
In FPO, Holyn Handley remained second, followed by Ohn Scoggins, Missy Gannon and Kristin Lätt. The bigger story was the movement behind them. Cadence Burge climbed back into the top 10 at No. 10, Jessica Gurthie rose to 20th, Alexis Mandujano moved to 21st, Taylor Chocek jumped to 29th, Violet Main advanced to 54th and Therese Cuevas made one of the biggest gains in the division, reaching 76th. Those are not cosmetic shifts; they change how the field looks entering the summer run and how quickly a strong weekend can reshape perception around the next tier of contenders.
MPO was similarly stable at the top, with Richard Wysocki, Calvin Heimburg, Niklas Anttila and Isaac Robinson completing the top five behind Buhr. Yet the real churn came just outside that block. Anthony Barela moved up to sixth, Adam Hammes climbed to ninth, Gavin Babcock advanced to 19th, Zachary Nash reached 30th, Silas Schultz rose to 32nd, Elijah Bickel surged to 78th and Dallas Garber landed at 97th. When players are moving that far up the board in late spring, the standings stop being a snapshot and start becoming a live indicator of who is carrying real momentum into the next marquee events.
The rankings themselves are built to reward that kind of form. The PDGA’s Official Disc Golf World Rankings use results from the previous 104 weeks, with more recent performances weighted more heavily, and the current system was relaunched in 2024 with a formula developed by the PDGA team alongside Mark Broadie and Dylan Bierne of SportEdge. Updates are expected each Wednesday after an Elite event or PDGA Major, so the board is designed to react quickly when a player strings together a strong stretch.
That next swing point is close. The DGPT+ Northwest Championship is set for June 4-7 in Portland, Oregon, with Jesse Tomaino listed as tournament director and 156 players entered as of June 1. The event is a Pro Elite Series stop and the next tournament to count toward the rankings, meaning the calm at No. 1 could be short-lived. The June schedule also shows the 2026 U.S. Amateur Disc Golf Championships running June 5-7 in Milford, Michigan, underscoring how much of the calendar is stacked into the same window. For Saarinen and Buhr, the lead is intact. For everyone chasing them, Portland is the chance to turn movement into leverage.
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