Tournament # 1

One of my goals this season was to play in more tournaments. Well, the first one of the year is in the books. And, well, it went terribly...

The tournament was at one of the area's nicest courses, but I hadn't played there in years. So the day before the tournament a few friends and I headed over to play the course and get re-acquainted. The round went well overall - an 88 for the day.

Strokes Gained from the practice round

The driver was finding fairways, my approaches were decent and my short game was damn good. I lost a lot of strokes with the putter but the greens were a lot faster than I was used to and with a lot more break. After the round, I felt pretty good about my chances the following day if I could just spend enough time before the round working on my putting and getting the greens down it should make for a good round of golf.

Man was I mistaken.

It didn't take long for things to go off the rails for me in the tournament. After a great tee shot on the first hole, I shanked my second shot straight into a small group of trees and was unable to find my ball. Somehow after a lost ball and all that I managed a double bogey. I did my best to gather myself and managed to par the second hole and thought I could keep grinding out some good holes. Then the wind happened...

A tight course, lined with lots of trees and wind gusting up to 59 km/hr is a recipe for a pretty rough round. The scores were much higher than in previous stops and I ended up getting a +2 addition to the Playing Conditions Calculation for the round. I seemed to figure it out on the last three holes for a run of pars but it was too little too late. Overall, my mental game was nowhere near where it needed to be for those conditions.

After the round, I was pretty disappointed with myself. My 101 for the day was my worst round in years and I lost 7 of my custom-numbered Pro V1x. But I was determined to bounce back after taking a couple of days off to reset.

Three days later, and after making a major putting change, I shot a 3 over 39 for my men's league round. Golf is weird... And I love it.

More on that putting change next time.