Falmouth Country Club was scheduled to hold the inaugural Live +Work in Maine Open in June. Instead, the 5-year contract for the Korn Ferry Tour event will begin in 2021. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer

The inaugural Live +Work in Maine Open, a Korn Ferry Tour professional golf tournament, has been canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The tournament was scheduled to be held at Falmouth Country Club from June 8-14, with 156 players competing for a $600,000 total purse. The Korn Ferry Tour is the PGA Tour’s top developmental professional tour and the primary means for golfers to attain PGA Tour status.

The PGA Tour, which owns and operates the Korn Ferry Tour, announced Thursday another wave of postponements and cancellations across its multiple professional tours. The Live + Work in Maine Open will not be held in 2020. Instead, the five-year contract for the event between the PGA Tour and Shamrock Sports & Entertainment, the Portland-based company that manages the tournament, will begin in 2021.

“In short, it was just the right decision,” said Shamrock CEO Brian Corcoran.”This is in the overall best interest of the event and what it was intended to be, a true celebration of community.”

The golf tournament is also a charitable fundraiser for the Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital and had a goal of raising $100,000. Corcoran said all of the partners involved, including lead sponsors, Falmouth Country Club and the PGA Tour, agreed it was important for the tournament’s inaugural event to be held with full fan and community participation.

“A lot of this goes back to our mission. We want to showcase Maine as a great place to live, work and play, and we would have been almost the antithesis of that if we (ran the tournament) without fans,” Corcoran said.

Tournament organizers will work to have a launch event for the 2021 tournament sometime this fall, with the intent of raising money for the children’s hospital.

Attendance tickets and sponsorship commitments that had already been purchased will be transferred and credited to the 2021 tournament, Corcoran said, “but at the end of the day, if someone wants a refund we will honor any request for a refund.”

While announcing the decision to cancel its trip to Maine, the Korn Ferry Tour canceled two other events, postponed another without a rescheduled date, and added a new tournament in what had been the Live + Work in Maine Open’s slot. That tournament will be played without fans at the TPC Sawgrass course in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. The PGA Tour is headquartered in Ponte Vedra Beach.