Sights set on year four and the continued journey towards better golf.

Well it’s hard to believe, but just like that, another golf season has come and gone. 

This now marks three seasons of the Golf Journey and while I didn’t achieve my main score goal for this year, and certainly didn’t document the journey as much as I did in year one, the most important thing is that my enjoyment for the game of golf is greater now than it ever has been. 

That said, this season was not without its fair share of frustrating rounds and that likely has something to do with why I haven’t published as many of these columns. Simply put, playing bad golf is frustrating enough on its own, without then sharing the experience in the pages of a newspaper. 

The purpose of the journey, as I stated at the beginning, wasn’t to focus on individual scoring goals, but to foster a lifelong love of the game, gradually developing a better understanding of it and the skills with which to play decently well until I’m an old man. 

However, I did have scoring goals set to basically keep my progress on a linear path. Last year the goal was to break 100, which I did. This year the goal was to break 90 and after a couple scores of 91 and a 92 very early in the season, I felt like I would be comfortably shooting in the 80s in no time. 

That didn’t prove to be the case and 91 is still my best 18-hole score. As I wrote in my last column, this season was one of a lot of ups and downs: a fantastic range session one evening and then a round so bad I stopped keeping score the next day. A brutal 110 my first time at Wildstone and then my best ever nine-hole score the next day. 

From there, it really felt like I had regressed, struggling to break 100 all over again and it started to get to me. I had a few rounds where I got really frustrated and my enjoyment of the game was a bit rattled. 

I think part of that came from two main things. One is that I really believe golf reflects life, and so when my life is busy and stressful, my head is busy and stressful on the course and I’m much more prone to frustration. 

The other main thing was that I had gotten too focused on the goal of breaking 90, instead of the overarching goal of simply playing and enjoying the game. I realized this in my most recent rounds, which have, as the summer’s progressed, become less frequent. 

At the start of the summer I had a ton of free time and was playing a lot and my scores reflected it. As the summer progressed I’ve had a lot on the go, socially and professionally, so my time to play is more precious and I have been treating it as such. The last round I played was a couple of weeks ago and although I still didn’t feel I played to the best of my abilities, I worried about it a lot less, had a ton of fun and wound up with a 96, which I would have been thrilled with a year ago. 

I also may not have broken 90, but I did set new personal best scores on 18 holes, nine holes (40 at Purcell) and the Rec 9 (38). I birdied holes I never have before and hit shots I wasn’t capable of hitting when I started out. 

So now the summer switches to fall, and my attention switches from ball golf back to disc golf, before it switches again to skiing. I’ve joked that with all the time I’ve put into golf, the disc golf skills I’d developed over the past seven or so years have diminished and I now just sort of suck at both, but I have been playing a lot more again recently and having a great time doing it. 

I’m truly lucky to live in this area as an enthusiast of golf, disc golf and skiing and I know that I don’t have to be elite at any of those hobbies to enjoy them to the fullest. At the time of writing I have two more rounds of golf booked, which looking at my schedule will probably be the last until next year. One’s at Shadow Mountain, the first time back at that monster in a couple years, and the other in a four-man scramble tourney. Can’t really think of a better way to wrap up the season. 

I look forward to next year and seeing where the golf journey takes me next.Â