Is the APA's own sample paper wrong? Non-standard citation format in the official student paper
I'm working on an APA style checker and ran into an edge case in APA's own student sample paper (downloaded from apastyle.apa.org).
The paper has this sentence:
>In 1973, Bernstein and Borkovec created a manual for helping professionals to teach their clients progressive muscle relaxation.
With the corresponding reference entry:
>Bernstein, D. A., & Borkovec, T. D. (1973). Progressive relaxation training: A manual for the helping professions. Research Press.
The year is integrated into the sentence before the authors, rather than using the standard narrative format Bernstein and Borkovec (1973) created... or parenthetical format ...(Bernstein & Borkovec, 1973).
Is this considered a valid in-text citation per APA 7th edition? I couldn't find a clear ruling in the manual on whether the year can appear separately from the author names like this, or if it strictly needs to be in one of the two standard formats. The fact that it's in APA's official sample paper suggests it's acceptable, but I'd like to hear from people who know the style guide better than I do. (Specifically please say yes it's fine or no it does not meet apa standard and why).
****Edit I have found the sample explainer pdf and APA gives a reason for this citation as: narrative citation with the year in the narrative, 8.11
https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/paper-format/student-annotated.pdf
