After back to back poor performances on the PGA TOUR Victoria’s Ryan Ruffels arrives at this week’s Quicken Loans National tournament with a point to prove.

The talented teenager was despondent after missing cuts at both the Memorial Tournament and last week’s Travelers Championship and will be keen to make amends when he tees off with Ryan Brehm and Sam Horsfield at 8.54am Thursday.

Ruffels posted some uncharacteristically high numbers in each of his last two PGA TOUR outings though sandwiched a runner-up finish on the PGA TOUR Latino America in between.

In the wake of missing the weekend at The Travelers he tweeted he was ‘way off’ but vowed to ‘work hard and figure things out’.

Ruffels is making his fifth of seven allowed starts on the PGA TOUR for 2017 and is joined in the field by another of Australia’s most promising young players, Curtis Luck.

Luck, too, is restricted to seven sponsor exemptions as a non-member of the Tour but is teeing up at TPC Potomac courtesy of his US Amateur victory in 2016 and still has three starts available to him after this week.

He too will be looking for an improved performance in Washington after missing the cut at his last start in Memphis courtesy of a second round 77.

Luck and Ruffels are part of a nine strong Australian assault at the Quicken Loans with Aaron Baddeley, Greg Chalmers, Matt Jones, Marc Leishman, Geoff Ogilvy, Rod Pampling and Cameron Percy also teeing up.

Leishman is the form player among the Australians in 2017 but with the tournament moving to a new venue this week there is little in the way of previous form to predict potential results.

Leishman’s game was once again decent without being spectacular at last week’s Travelers and the laid back Victorian seems not far from putting all facets together.

Too many minor mistakes were costly at TPC River Highlands but the Arnold Palmer Invitational winner will be encouraged by his scoring despite not having his best game.

2006 U.S. Open winner Geoff Ogilvy will also take some encouragement from his play last week where a second round 65 was not only the second best score of the day but was his personal best for 2017.

Ogilvy said recently he felt his game was close to getting back to where it needs to be to compete and there have been indications of that in in recent weeks.

While his finishes haven’t been as high as he would like he has missed only two cuts since the Shell Houston Open in April and produced some individual stretches of good play along the way.

Of the remaining Australians Matt Jones and Cameron Percy are both close to breaking into the top 125 on the FedEx Cup list and will be looking for strong play this week.

Percy is 141^st in the standings while Jones is 132^nd but with limited opportunities remaining for both there is a sense of urgency at this stage of the season.