The National Golf Association's Hooters Tour has some changes planned for 2007, including cutting its tournament schedule from 22 events to 18 or less and increasing each purse to a minimum of $200,000.

The tour will remain largely in the East and Southeast, though the 2007 season will again begin with an event in Guatemala.

To cut travel costs for the tour and its players, Hooters Tour president Robin Waters plans to eliminate events in the Green Bay and Chicago areas, though he intends to retain a three-event stretch in Arkansas and Oklahoma.

"Taking into consideration travel expenses now that gas has gotten so high, we're looking at coming back to the East Coast and Southeast," Waters said.

The North Myrtle Beach-based tour hasn't been down to as few as 17 tournaments since the early 1990s. It will take the month of July and first two weeks in August off to miss the oppressively hot portion of the summer, as it did two years ago. In Mississippi last month, Waters said at least a dozen players withdrew due to the heat.

The Hooters Tour will once again stage a Florida winter series in the Orlando area from October through January.

Waters said tour officials consulted the players' board on its preferences.

Events will have guaranteed $200,000 purses -- up from about $140,000 to $150,000 per event this year -- regardless of the number of players entered. Waters believes the purses will further cement his tour's claim of being the best tour behind the PGA and Nationwide tours. Six former members of the Hooters Tour comprise half of the U.S. Ryder Cup team playing at the K Club this week.

"There's so much diversity in the developmental tour industry right now, with so many different smaller tours now, but we've been competing against them for years now and have always held our way at the top," Waters said. "Our credentials and our history speak for themselves. ... What we have works, and we know it does."

The schedule will begin in March and end in late September or early October, just before the first stage of the PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament.

The tournaments that will fall off the schedule will likely be eliminated through natural attrition.

"Attrition is about 75 percent each year with tournaments you continue with," Waters said. "Either contracts run out, it's time to renegotiate, or it was a bad business venture for everyone concerned, we didn't receive positive feedback from the players."

Myrtle Beach getting cut from the schedule is "very unlikely," Waters said. "This is home. Of all the places we play in the country, this is home."

If the tour returns to Myrtle Beach, there's a good chance it will return to River Hills Golf & Country Club, which was a late replacement for Wild Wing Plantation for the Michelob Ultra Classic two weeks ago after the Woodstork Course closed for redevelopment.

"It was purely amazing the way we pulled this tournament off here," Waters said. "Working with the club here, the volunteers, the neighbors, the residents made it unbelievably easy."

Player feedback on River Hills, which closed in 2002 for a renovations project that included the installation of Champions Bermudagrass greens, was "overwhelmingly positive," Waters said. "Condition-wise we hit it just perfect. With the greens being Bermuda, these guys were astonished with the speed and consistency -- close to being as good or better as we've played on all season."

Rob Bradley of Jacksonville, Fla., who spent several years on the Nationwide Tour, told Waters that River Hills had the best Bermuda greens he's ever experienced.

"If we work it out and come back to Myrtle Beach, we'll be back [at River Hills]," Waters said.