Not a Great Start but Feeling Good!

The Spring Creek Golf Club here in Charlottesville, Virginia, is an absolutely beautiful and challenging course. The course has great bentgrass fairways that are very wet right now, so the course, which is normally medium length, is playing very long this week. While the fairways are usually generous, some pretty severe fairway bunkers and dense woods line virtually every hole. The real challenge, though, exists on and around the greens. Very fast putting surfaces combined with significant undulations and a lot of run-off chipping areas make accurate iron shots and great short game touch a must to have a successful round. It's a great course which definitely offers a good challenge, but with greens rolling perfectly and soft conditions, good scores are still very much available.

I played two practice rounds on Monday and Tuesday, and felt pretty good going into today's first round. Though I actually had a lousy warm-up session this morning, I went out and played a beautiful round. I hit all but three fairways and hit 15 greens in regulation. On most all of those 15 greens, I had a very make-able look at birdie, but I could only manage to make three of them and had to settle for a disappointing score of one-under-par 71. I just wasn't very comfortable on the greens today. I feel like I hit a lot of good putts, but never seemed to have the break figured quite properly. I'm really confident that I'm going to continue to roll the ball well, and I know that they will start going in tomorrow.

My round today has me just behind the middle of the pack. Scores were pretty low with the lead belonging to a couple of guys at 65. We are only one fourth of the way done this week. With three rounds left, I feel like I can definitely get myself back into contention. I tee it up at 8:20 tomorrow morning, and I'm going to shoot something low!

Check back here for an update after round 2.