When Zach Johnson comes to his home town of Cedar Rapids, good things happen. As they did this week with Zach's promotion of Kids On Course.

Before we get into that, let's make a few comments about what the Z-Man has done on his first half of the PGA Tour season.

I told him at Van Buren School, at the start of my interview with him, that I likened it to Guts Golf. He didn't know whether that was a compliment or a criticism.

I told him that it was by far a compliment, the way he has performed in his last three tournaments. At Charlotte, he came from 75th to fourth. At the Players Championship, he came from 100th to 12th. And his Sunday round at Colonial of 65 vaulted him to fourth place.

That's the sort of "guts" play that Zach emulates. He called it "boring golf" - fairways, tees, greens. And when the putter is working, that also means a high finish on the leaderboard.

For the month of June, Zach will play at Memphis to get ready for his performance in the U.S. Open at Congressional in Washington, D.C. Then it will be back to the Quad Cities in early July to try and win where he's not been able to so far. His game is certainly good enough now for a run at any of those titles.

But the main reason he was back home was to visit Harrison and Van Buren elementary schools as the pilot project for the Zach Johnson Foundation program called Kids On Course. This is a million-dollar startup effort to keep kids on a course to graduate by experiencing things they otherwise would not have the resources to do.

It will have a $350,000 per year budget and an investment of more than $1,050,000 over three years. Much of this will come from the star-studded group that will gather for Zach's Classic Pro-Am Golf Tournament at Elmcrest in Cedar Rapids on August 1.

I am sure the stars' names will whet the appetite of the patrons of this event who will help finance the Kids On Course pilot program. Again, when Zach comes to town, it's a win-win situation.