Quick Update

Mid-terms have come and gone. Some were easier than others, but even the hardest wasn't too difficult. After all, it is a golf school :) The grading site the school uses has been encountering some problems this week so I don't know the exact grades yet, but hopefully it gets straightened out soon. I'd like to know where I stand.

I do, however, know how I did on the Short Game Skills Evaluation. I talked about this at the beginning of the semester as the only thing that brings everyone's grades down. Last Thursday was the Lag putting, Short putting, and chipping portion. We had 2 attempts at 20 foot putts, 30 ft, 40 ft, 50 ft, and 60 ft and the object was to get the ball within 6 ft of the hole or you lost 1 pt. The teacher had this portion set up on a downhill right to left part of the green, and I made an illustration of how it was setup below. If you made the putt, you got 3 pts, if you were inside the closest cirle, you got 2 pts, if you were inside the second closest circle you got 1 pt, and if you were inside the outter-most circle you got 0 pts. I got 12 pts total on this portion.

Once we finished the lag putting, my partner Pete and I moved on to the short putting challenge. We had 2 attempts at 3 footers, 6 footers, 9 footers, 12 footers, and 15 footers breaking both left to right and right to left. An illustration of this setup is below. For each putt we made, we received 2 pts, and if we missed we got 0 pts. This was the portion of the evaluation where it was a great chance to make up some pts you didn't get in other parts of the evalauation. I made 7 total and got 14 pts.

The chipping portion was on a seperate green out on the course, so once we finished the putting portions, we had to hike across the course to this unused green to start the chipping. I won't waste a drawing on this part, I know you're bummed cuz I'm such a great artist, but it was setup like the Lag Putting in terms of the circles around the hole. There were 2 holes setup on the green, one for the 60 foot chip and one of the 30 foot chip. The setup couldn't have played more into my favor because the green sloped back to front, which meant we were chipping straight uphill, which makes it easier to judge the speed once the ball got rolling, and my chipping style is to keep the ball low, and use a club that allows me to make the ball check, or spin, once it hits the green and then allow it release towards the hole. So I used my 9 iron on the 60 footer and put 4 of the 5 attempts inside 3 ft. Then on the 30 footer I used the 9 iron again and put all 5 inside 3 ft. 2 attempts hit the hole and came back out. So I dominated the chipping.

Yesterday was the second and final day of the Skills Evaluation. It consisted of bunker shots and pitch shots. I arrived early enough to get a feel for the sand we were going to play out of, and based on my past experience in this practice bunker, I knew it was going to be difficult to spin the ball because the sand is just powder. And to make things harder, the teacher set it up so the hole was 6 ft off the green on the near side to us in the bunker. There's a short area of rough, maybe 2 ft, a foot of fringe, then it's 6ft to the hole, so that meant you either landed the ball in the rough and take your chances on it chasing through and trickling on to the green, or take the high route and land it on the fringe and hope it lands softly and doesn't roll too far. We had 10 attempts in the bunker, and I decided I was going to take the high route. The first shot was our choice to use as practice or not. If we hit a good shot, we could take the pts and then the practice option was gone. But if we had a poor shot outside the 6 ft circle, we could consider it a practice and then the next shots would count towards the 10 attempts. Trying to hit the high shots is risky, so I took advantage of the practice option and just tried to hit a miracle spinning gem. As the ball took off like a bat out of hell and a considerable distance into the driving range, I realized I'm not Tiger Woods, so I adjusted my approach and decided to just barely get it out of the bunker and hope it would roll onto the green. In the end, I hit 4 inside 3 ft, and 3 inside 6 ft, with the final 3 outside the circle. I was satisfied with my efforts.

Then we had the same hike to the other unused green out on the course for the pitching portion. It was about 90 ft, and on the exact same line as the chipping portion from the week before. I just took out a wedge, put it in the back of my stance, and hit low chasers up the hill and inside the circle. I hit 7 inside 3 ft, 2 inside 6 ft, and 1 outside 6 ft. I was extremely happy with my efforts here. My two week total for the Short Game Skills Evaluation was 57 pts. The only score in the class that was higher was 63. That doesn't mean I got an A or anything, the teacher will have the grade scales for us next week in class. We do this same thing again for the final, and if we improve our score, he'll take that higher score along with 5 bonus points for the official Evaluation grade. If it's lower, he'll keep the higher one. So I'm happy with how I performed, and if I do better next time, great, but if I don't, I'm not worried.

Match Play

Lost my match today 2&1. Not happy. 2&1 means I was 2 holes down with 1 hole left to play. I was hitting the ball pretty crappy with my irons, so I was constantly scrambling for par, although if my putter hadn't been working, it would have been over after 9 holes. I made 10 of 10 putts inside 12 feet, and probably 8 of those were for par to halve the holes. It could have been worse, but it should have been better.

Also, our first official USGA handicaps were calculated, and mine is 8.9. When we played with the pro that first week, he put me at a 12 hdcp based on what he saw that day, but I knew I was better than that, I just had to work hard to prove it. So with the score cards I turned in throughout September, my hdcp was adjusted to 8.9. That was good enough to move me up 2 Tours to the Golden Bear Tour. I was in the Palmetto Tour, the 8th out of 10 Tours, and now I'm in the 6th out of 10. I know I'm better than an 8.9, so now I have to keep posting lower scores to keep moving up. No golf next week cuz of Mid-Terms, so I'll just keep working on the short game.

Match Play Qualifier

Yesterday was the biggest tournament of the semester so far, and one that I really wanted to do well. The top 16 players from each Tour qualify for the Match Play Tournament, and the winners of the Tournament get a free round at the World Tour golf course (definitely the nicest course in the area, it's 18 holes of replicas of famous golf holes around the world, they have Amen Corner from Augusta, 1 and 18 from St. Andrews, I really wanna play there) 70 dollars in gift cards to the golf merchandise store, and Order of Merit Points. I played a course called Man O' War. It's a difficult course. There's island greens, lots of water all down the fairways and in the landing areas, and deep bunkers. I decided going in that I wasn't going to focus on the tendinitis in the left arm, I was just going to focus on each and every shot and hopefully qualify. I ended up shooting 85 and that was good enough for 14th of the 16 that qualified. I'm assuming I'll play the kid who was 3rd, and I think I can beat him. He's in my classes, and he just got promoted to our Tour from the crappy Tour below mine, and I think his 78 he shot yesterday was a fluke. So I'm confident I can advance past him. Once I signed my scorecard and walked out to my car to load my bag in the trunk, I realized how bad my elbow and wrist hurt. So I'm happy I got through the qualifying, and now I'm going to play again today with 3 kids from class who wanted to play with me, and then I'll take some rest from golf like I did last week.

We had our first quiz in the Rules class last Friday, and boy was it a doozy. Here's a link to a rules quiz exactly like what I'll be taking through this class. Try the 10 question basic, it's a different language. http://www.usga.org/playing/rules/rules_quizzes.html
I got 4 out of 10 right, and that was the class average. Once everyone finished, Lew explained that this would be the easiest quiz we take all year, and because we've never experienced a Rules quiz, he would take how many we got right and add it on to our next quiz. So it was extra credit, thankfully. But he said the more quizzes we do on that site I posted, the better prepared we'll be. So I'll do a few of those each day. I got an e-mail from the Academics Counselor today during class and it turns out my Business teacher is letting me get that transfer credit I've been trying for. John e-mailed me a syllabus from the class I took at ICC last spring, and the counselor said it wasn't good enough, but he let the Business teacher decide, and he thought it was comparable to the class I was in right now. That means no more 7am class!!!!!!!! That is such a relief. Now I can watch the finale of Highway 18 and the premiere of Big Break 10 on Golf Channel tonight! Normally I'm in bed before those shows start, but now I don't have class till 11 tomorrow!!!! Ahhhh how sweet it is.

The Lesson/Rules of Golf Class

We've been in school for 4 weeks now, but each Friday that we've gone to our Rules class, our teacher has been gone. His name is Lew Gach, and he's one of the top Rules Officials in the entire world. He's been gone on Friday's because he officiates professional tournaments. So this week he was actually here to teach. He's even cooler than the other pro's on staff. He has officiated over 300 PGA Tour, Nationwide Tour, Hooters Tour, Buy.com Tour and Nike Tour events in his career. He's walked inside the ropes with all the top players, including Tiger. At the start of class, he gave us a run-down on his credentials, and one of the smart-alec kids in my class pulled out his rule book and interjected "What's rule 26-2?" Lew didn't miss a beat, and he spit out the entire rule word for word. There's 34 or 38 rules in the Rules of Golf book, and they're all a special golf lingo, and he recited it exactly how it was in the book. We were all shocked. The rest of the class consisted of us asking him what the ruling would be for all sorts of circumstances we've been in. He knew the answer to every single one of them. He had a pretty cool story about an encounter with Lee Trevino he had in 1979. Lew was in charge of the scorer's tent at a Tour tournament, so when the players walk off the 18th green, they go to the scorers tent and make sure their scores are correct and they turn their score cards into the officials. On the 13th hole, Trevino's ball plugged, landed in its own divot, and Trevino wouldn't touch his ball until a rules official came over to tell him what to do. For a Tour pro, that's a pretty common issue, so normally, no one calls for the rules official. At the end of the round in the scorers tent, Trevino's playing partner asked him why he called for the official, cuz he knew what to do. Trevino responded "It's not my job to know the rules, it's HIS!" and he pointed directly at Lew. Lew cooly responded "Not today Mr. Trevino. I'm just here to make sure you added your scores correctly." I thought that was pretty cool. And Adam, I don't know if you know who Slugger White is, he's the Rules official we see on TV whenever a player calls for a ruling, but Lew is on the same level as Slugger, which is as high as it gets for a rules guru. So by the time I graduate, I will have learned from the best person available to teach us the rules of golf.

After that class, I had my lesson with the pro. The lessons are conducted in the indoor simulators that we have, there's 2 simulators in the room with the smaller putting green, and the third simulator is connected to the massive putting green in the other building. My lesson was on the smaller putting green, and luckily for me, the Ryder Cup was on during our lesson, so we both looked up to watch whenever we heard a big roar on TV. This is the same pro that worked at Valhalla in the 1980's (Valhalla is the course where the Ryder Cup is being played right now) so he was really interested in what was going on, but he didn't let it get in the way of my lesson. He really switched me around in what I was doing, and I think it'll help my putting out considerably. One problem I've seen with some of the pro's is that they make you feel kind of dumb for doing some of the things that you do in your golf swing, but this guy didn't do that. He showed me some things that I was doing that made me pretty upset with myself, but he didn't care, he just wanted me to know that what he was showing me will fix those problems. So I'll hit the putting green tonight once the Ryder Cup coverage is over, and hopefully I'll be more comfortable with my putting in time for the tournament on Monday. This tournament will be stroke-play, but next week is our match-play qualifier, and I really want to qualify for that because match-play is pretty awesome. I wanna get in there and feel the pressure you can put on your opponent and feel the pressure my opponent puts on me.

Tournament Numero Uno

The moment I had been anticipating since December when I decided to go here finally came on Monday: my first tournament. My tour was playing at Indian Wells, Myrtle Beach's "Golf Course of the Year" in 2004. It's the same course I played 3 weeks ago for my first open play round. I was so nervous on the first tee. I was playing with a 4th semester student and two first semester students. They all went first and no one hit a good shot, so that made me even more nervous for some reason. I stepped up and hit the best shot of my life, considering the circumstances, a perfect 3 wood right down the center of the fairway. I was left with 105 yds to the green and I hit a wedge on the green and 2 putted for par. Once I made that par my nerves calmed down considerably, so from that point on it was me against the course. The format was not the regular stroke play, it's a format called Stableford. Instead of making par or making birdie or bogey, you get points based on what score you made. Par is worth 2 pts, birdie's 3 pts, eagles 4 pts, and bogeys 1 pt. Anything worse than a bogey was 0 pts. To make things even wierder for a tournament, we had to play 6 holes from the blue (hardest) tees, 6 holes from the white (average) tees, and 6 holes from the red (ladies) tees. It was some golf holiday so they wanted us to play Red White and Blue tees in honor of that. Logically, I played all four of the par 5's (the longest holes) from the red (ladies) tees. That made them considerably shorter, and it paid off because I birdied 3 of the 4 par 5's and bogeyed the other, so that's 10 pts on those 4 holes alone. I hit the ball really well but once again struggled around the greens. I only ended up with 21 pts while the winner of my tour had 35, second place had 28, so that kid was too good for this tour anyway, so I wasn't too dissapointed about finishing 14 pts behind first. My 21 pts was good enough for a tie for 15th place out of 35 guys. I'm not too dissapointed, because it was my very first tournament, but I should have done better, and this next tournament on Monday will be different, trust me.

Today, my Short Game class and my Golf Fundamentals class met at the home golf course for what they consider "lab." I consider it practice/fun, but that's neither here nor there. For Short Game, we partnered up and we each hit 10 foot putts and the other person had to check the fundamentals of our stroke, setup, alignment, all that good stuff. The teacher went around to all of the groups to offer his advice based on what he saw with our stroke. Once we finished that, he had us all hit the same 20 footer for 10 extra credit points. So, one by one we all attempted the same putt. Only 1 kid made it, and we moved on to a 60 foot lag putt for the same 10 extra credit pts. The teacher went first and left it 5 ft from the hole, so he said whoever gets inside of mine gets 10 pts, no matter how many people do it. I think 5 or 6 people got those pts, I was unsuccessful at both putts, but I don't really care. So that was fun.

Once Short Game was over, we proceeded to the opposite end of the driving range where a whole bunch of third semester students were waiting for us. We were paired up with one of the third semester guys and we started hitting balls. The point of that was so that they could start getting used to giving strangers lessons. They had a checklist of things to do with each of us so they can see what grips we try and how it affects our ball flight. I was paired with a pretty cool kid from Minnesota. He had me hit a few balls with my normal grip, and I hit 3 perfect shots. So he had me strengthen and weaken my grip to see what happened, and it was wierd and different but it gave him a chance to work with me and suggest things that could help adjust to that change. I wasn't forced to keep any of the things he showed me in my normal swing, but for the duration of the lesson, we were supposed to just try whatever they told us to do. So we worked through the suggested things to try in like 10 minutes so he had me keep hitting balls cuz he really liked my swing. After a while, he had me hitting huge hooks and huge slices to see if I could. He had me aiming at a car in the distance and curve it at the yardage markers, it was a lot fun. I actually gave him some pointers because he hits the ball a lot higher than I do, so he asked me how I hit the ball as low as I do. I got a lot of possitive feedback from him about my swing, so I walked away very happy with the class. We'll have 4 more of those "labs" throughout the semester. I can't wait.

I have my first professional lesson tomorrow at 11, and I'm really excited. It's with the same pro that I played with last week. He told me to schedule a lesson with him so we could start working on my putting, and that's exactly what I plan on doing tomorrow. Lower scores, here I come!

My first Hurricane (ok fine, my first Tropical Storm, big deal)

While living here in paradise has its perks, it also has its downsides. Exhibit A: Tropical Storm Hanna. Whenever I turned on the TV and stopped on either the local channels or the weather channel, all I was hearing about was Hurricane Hanna, Hurricane Ike, and Tropical Storm Josephine making there way to the southeastern US coast. So I was keeping a close eye on all three storms as the week went on. On Wednesday, the academy decided to cancel Friday's classes in preparation for Hanna. That was pretty sweet, but it ended up kinda sucking because the weather wasn't good enough to hit the driving range, and the outter bands of the storm didn't get here until about 9 that night. So I was just waiting around for the big storm. By the time I passed out, probably around 11 (side note, I haven't been able to stay awake passed 11 the whole time I've been down here, hard to believe eh mom?), the winds were whipping and the rain was coming down sideways. So I had some nice background noise to help me sleep. Right around 3:30am, I was rudely awakened by Hanna and her 60 mile an hour winds howling through the complex. So I kinda sat there to see if my windows would shatter or not, and within about 10-20 minutes, the winds completely stopped. I learned later in the morning when I woke up, that Hanna made landfall at 3:45am IN Myrtle Beach. So the winds stopping signified the eye of the storm was right over us. And then another 20 minutes after the winds died, they picked right back up again stronger than before. That was a pretty cool moment when I realized I was in the eye of the storm. I always hear how the eye is NOT the spot to be in. But since it was only a Tropical Storm and not a, say, Category 5 HURRICANE, I was pretty stoked to have been right in the middle of the storm. So once Hanna passed on through, I turned my attention to Hurricane Ike. Luckily for me, Ike made a slight turn to the southwest and decided the pound the Bahamas again and head for the gulf. And Josephine was destroyed out at sea by wind shear, so it appears that all the hurricane excitement for me is done for now, but it was fun while it lasted.

On Tuesday, I played my first round of golf at a course called Indian Wells. It's definitely the nicest course on our 15 course rotation, and we were randomly assigned to the courses, so I was pretty fortunate to be playing the nicest. The three guys I played with were pretty cool guys. The guy I rode with had just moved down here the night before, and he's from Ann Arbor, MI. He's in my classes so we've been keeping in touch, which is nice. The other two guys were from Pittsburgh and Cleveland, and they weren't very good. I beat those two guys, but the guy I rode with beat me, even though I thought I beat him when we were done. He just has a really ugly swing, so it made me think that I was better, but he beat me by 9 strokes. I did not play well, but the greens and fairways have different grass than the midwest does, and it's a lot harder to play on. It's no excuse for me playing as poorly as I did, but it's something I'm going to have to get used to in order to bring my scores down to where I'm used to. Tomorrow, we play with one of our Pros at our home course Whispering Pines. Again, we were randomly assigned Pros to play with (we have 10 at the academy) and I was assigned with the coolest of the bunch, in my opinion. He's my golf fundamentals teacher, and having been in two of his classes already, he seems like he really knows his stuff and he should be fun to play with. I play again on Tuesday at River Oaks Plantation, not one of the nicest courses in our rotation, but it's definitely nicer than the courses back home, so I'm not complaining.

Back to School at Last!

Not including this past spring semester, when I only took 2 classes, I'm finally back to school full-time. School started yesterday bright and early at 7am. That's 7am EASTERN time folks, so while all of you were comfortably sleeping, or tending to the many needs of new-born Ellie, I was sitting in the classroom. Fortunately for me, Wednesday's are the only days I start class at 7. Mondays start at 10 but only for an hour then it's tournament time in the afternoon. Tuesdays start at 8 and end at 10, then it's free golf in the afternoon. Wednesdays start at 7 and don't end until 1. Thursdays are packed, class from 8 until 3. Then Fridays class from 8 until 10. So having only been to my Wednesday and Thursday classes so far, here are my first impressions of the staff and classes:

My Attitude and Motivation Assessment teacher is crazy. She's straight out of Brooklyn, short, husky, and pretty cool. She talks at a hundred miles an hour, runs around the classroom and loves interacting with us students. Right at the start of class, she has us all stand up, close our eyes and wait for her to tell us it's ok to look. While standing there with our eyes closed, Eye of the Tiger comes on. She gives us the ok to look up and she's wearing a pink hoody with "Eye of the Tiger" written on the back, and she has children's sized boxing gloves on her tiny hands. She starts going in and out of the aisles punching all of us guys in the chest trying to get us the play along and spar with her. None of us knew what was going on so we basically just stood there and watched as she beat up every single one of us. She realized that no one really knew what the point of the demonstration was, so she laughed it off and put her costume away and let us sit down. (The music went on to the next song of the Rocky soundtrack, so I was quietly singing along.) She wrote on the board a question. The question was "Are you willing to put everything on the line to achieve your dreams?" Do we have the Eye of the Tiger? So basically she's going to be helping us build self-confidence in ourselves and help us take adversity and turn it into a positive experience so we can grow as people and as professionals. All in all, I think I'll enjoy the class.

Oh yeah, and I am also stuck with the biggest group of immature losers. In orientation, they had us grouped by last names. So I was in the A-D group, and I thought that was just for orientation, and that my classes would be a mixture of all the incoming first semester students. I was wrong. I am stuck with that same group of kids for the entire semester. These guys are anywhere from 18-35. In terms of maturity, I would much rather hang out with our sort-of-cousin Dalton, if that puts it into perspective for anyone. These guys are only there to party and hit the night clubs. So I'm pretty dissapointed to not have any friends in the classes, but I'll make friends on Mondays and Tuesdays when we are randomly paired with people to golf out on the course, where you get the true sense of someone's character.

This afternoon I had my first Short Game class. That teacher is pretty laid back. He's a self-proclaimed awesome touch/feel golfer. That means that he doesn't know a whole lot about the mechanics of the golf swing, he just does what feels right, and he gets the results he wants. Only a very select few golfers are like this, I am not one of those people. So having that natural touch or feel is a great advantage in the short game. The short game is considered anywhere from about 50 yds or closer to the green. So putting, chipping, green-side bunkers are all considered part of the short game. That is the part of the game of golf that makes or breaks you as a golfer. Anyone can get the ball close to the green, but the hard part is getting the ball in the hole as quickly as possible. So the teacher gave us the run-down on what to expect in his class. We'll only have 5 classroom days, while the other 10 are out on the course. At the mid-term and finals time, we will have a skills test. This is where most people lose ground on their grade. The class work is an easy A, but this test is hard. You have 10 tries for each type of shot. The shots include green-side bunker, chipping, pitching, and putting. For each of the non-putting shots, you must get the ball within 5ft of the hole or else you lose points. There will be circles of varying distances chalked on the green so we know how many points we get for each shot. If you hole the shot, it's 3 pts. If you're within 5 ft, it's 2 pts. If you're within 6-10 ft, it's 1 pt. If you're outside 10 ft you get 0 pts. So the pressure is on to be able to get the ball close to the hole. Then the putting test includes making 10 three footers, 10 six footers, and 10 eight footers. All of those putts will have left to right breakers, and right to left breakers. That is extremely hard to do. Then there's a lag putting test. You have putts of 30 ft, 40 ft, 50 ft, 60 ft, and 70 ft and you must get the ball within 5 ft on the attempt or else you get 0 pts. So I've decided I'm no longer going to the driving range, I am strictly going to the putting green and devoting my practice time to the short game. Without a solid short game, shooting low scores is extremely difficult, and getting an A in this class is impossible without maximum practice time.

My other classes are kinda boring. I have a business writing class, and that's basically English 101 but put into terms related to the golf industry. The teacher kept saying "Our writing markets our product along with ourselves as professionals." So that might get boring in a hurry. Golf Fundamentals should be pretty easy as well. The best golf pro on staff teaches that class, and he's really cool. Not a whole lot of studying in the classroom, just studying our ball flight when we play then using that information to find out what we're doing wrong in our golf swing.

I have my first open-play round on Tuesday at 1:30. I'm paired with 3 guys from the other parts of the alphabet, so I'll be meeting at least 3 new people. I'm playing at a course called Indian Wells, and it's considered the nicest course on our 15 course rotation. I think there are four groups on each course, so it's a random draw who plays where. Also, one of the golf pro's will be playing nine holes with us. This is so they can evaluate our skills so they can accurately place us in the appropriate Tour for tournaments. There are multiple Tours, and depending on what you shoot one week could change what Tour you play in the next week. So if I go out and shoot in the 70's, which I intend on doing, I should be placed in the Nationwide Tour, which is the second best Tour at the school. But if I shoot 85 the next week, I might drop a Tour or two, but that doesn't effect my grades or anything, they just want people of like skills in all of the Tours. Prizes are awarded to the top 7 or 8 from each Tour, so that's a nice incentive to play well. Also, the Tours are all of the students at the entire academy. I could be in the same tour as one of the fourth-semester guys, so that's cool that we'll be pitted against the veterans of the academy.

Well, I think that's everything about school for now. My apartment is fine, I can't get my mailbox open though.... hopefully I'll figure it out some time soon. No neighbors that are my age or that wanna talk. I walk by them on the way in and they just look at the ground and run passed me, so I just sit here in my apartment when I'm not in school or practicing. At least I have golf channel, though. Without it, I might be back at home by now. Not really, but I'd be bored out of my mind. Did I leave anything out? Just ask if I left something out and I'll fill ya in. Toodles.