Mention "Minor League" and "Florida" in April and right off the bat baseball is what comes to mind.

Monday at Pearl Country Club, The Minor League Golf Tour will tee off. It is a trial event for the 12-year-old tour that, until now, has played its tournaments within 90 miles of Jupiter, Fla.

Hawaii’s Alvin Okada, who has been playing the tour since September, and Nicole Sakamoto, working as a Minor League intern while she pursues professional options in the area, will run the one-day event. Okada will also play.

"She’s helped us run about 15 or 20 events," says Minor League Golf owner Jay Slazinski of Sakamoto. "She is pretty comfortable with all our systems. We’ve had events with 70 players that were pretty hectic with just three of us running it, so I think she’s ready to do it and I’m excited for them. It’s a good test to see if there is a market for it there and see if people are interested in playing in Hawaii."

Sakamoto and Okada, who characterizes his seven months on the tour as "life changing," brought the idea up with Slazinski originally.

"We were talking to Jay and he mentioned he would like to expand his tour," recalls Sakamoto, who will also try to qualify for the LPGA Lotte Championship while she is home. "Alvin and I thought it would be a great opportunity to have a professional tour in Hawaii because there aren’t many tournaments for professionals."

They are looking for about 15 players and fighting the skepticism that remains from past tour failures here. Okada, a Waianae alum, has been sold on this tour since Sakamoto, out of Kalani, convinced him to give it a try last fall.

"I like how I get paid quickly, everything is well organized, the level of competition is fierce, the tour is cost efficient, and they play many nice courses," says Okada, who turned pro in 2007 and also tried the Hooters and eGolf tours. "The difference is they pay 40-50 percent of the field so it makes you grind. The tour is run by someone who is not there to make money and caters to the players, and you get paid quickly."

Slazinski got to know the outgoing Okada in September, when the tour owner — and former owner and manager of software companies — was contemplating changes that would allow local pros to run Minor League events all over the country.

Slazinski is revamping his website (minorleaguegolf. com) so players can register, pay and get paid, and follow "live results" all online. The site has results of all 1,200-plus events the tour has run since it began in 2004, along with notes on its total tour payout over the years (some $6 million — $179,000 this year), a current money list (Okada is 19th with $2,700) and information about some of the 16 former players who have gone on to the PGA Tour.

He played college golf with Stephen Ames in the ’80s, along with a few others who were so much better he figured his future was not on the tour. He focused on software until he was 35, when his wife settled into a good job. Slazinski then took a year to "chase the dream."

"I discovered how crazy the golf world was," he said by phone from Florida. "It was so expensive to try and play tournaments. In just a couple of months you are money poor. You can’t get the experience to get your game ready to compete on a world-class level.

"I wanted to start a tour at a level where you could work at a golf course or as a waiter and still get in as many rounds as if you were on the PGA or LPGA tours — play 10 to 12 days a month and still work as a waiter and chase the dream."

Most Minor League events are one day, like Pearl, which Slazinski believes helps golfers learn how to succeed at the next step — Monday qualifiers. Live scoring online allows golfers, and those who follow them, to see where they stand. The payout "is deep, not top heavy" and guarantees the top quarter of the field at least breaks even.

His first tour event had three entries and that year hurricanes nearly chased him away. But he stuck with it and now averages about 40 golfers per tournament, and the tour teed it up 121 times last year.

All were in Florida, but Slazinski hopes Hawaii will take, and is talking to someone in New York about staging six Minor League tournaments.

Okada and Sakamoto hope the expansion works.

"My experience on the tour has been life changing because I’m playing with the players who have won on the highest level and I see their game is not out of the ordinary," says Okada, whose best finish is third. "When you see that it makes you believe that I am also at that level."

Pierre-Henri Soero and Eric Dugas, who also lived in Hawaii, have played on the tour. Brooks Koepka, who won this year’s Phoenix Open, captured the 2012 Minor League Tour Championship.

Amateurs, who play for gift cards, are also eligible to compete along with women, who play "no less than 94 percent of the yardage." Lexi Thompson has teed it up on the tour and Sakamoto and Okada tied for fifth at a team event last December, where Sakamoto had a hole-in-one.

Entry fee for pros at Pearl is $180, plus $25 for membership. In contrast, players on the eGolf Professional Tour pay $1,000-plus for a four-day event.