Good Week for Indoor Work + A Look Ahead



Malnati Family Resort


 

I was bragging on my East Tennessee weather in my post about last week. I spoke too soon. After receiving more than six inches of rain from late Sunday evening through mid-day on Thursday, the temperatures turned cold a couple hours before the rain system finally moved out of Tennessee on Thursday evening. The result is a winter wonderland currently sitting atop the same ground that saw temperatures in the mid-70s just five short days ago. 

Mini snow-man. I named him Herb.




 

My friend William Harrold and I trudged out into the rain and played 7 holes on Monday, and I captured one of the few dry hours of the week to sneak in some practice on Wednesday afternoon, but other than that, I have been doing a lot of indoor activities this week. I definitely would prefer to be putting in full days at the golf course, but I can do some things to get better indoors, and this gives me a good opportunity to further organize myself and my plans for the year.

I am planning to have the busiest and best year of my career in 2013. I have once again joined the eGolf Professional Tour and will certainly play a fairly full schedule on that circuit. In addition to that, however, I have also decided to join the NGA Tour (formerly the "Hooters Tour"). The NGA Tour is the oldest developmental tour in the United States. I am excited to be playing both tours this year because I will have the opportunity to play I highly competitive golf tournament nearly every week if I choose to do so. The NGA Tour will also offer a nice bit of variety to my schedule. The eGolf and NGA schedules offset decently well, and I will be able to play a good deal on both. As you can see in my Outcome Goals for 2013, I truly believe that if I play the full year on mini-tours in the USA, I can be the leading money winner on both tours.

The "if" in that last statement hints at some of my other possible plans for 2013. The PGA Tour announced last fall that it will take over operations of the Canadian Tour starting in 2013. Little information has been released about the details of qualifying for the PGA Tour Canada (as it is now called) or its schedule for the year, but it has been made clear that the top five on the tour's year-end Order of Merit will earn status on the 2014 Web.com Tour. That perk alone is enough to make the PGA Tour Canada an intriguing option. Much remains to learned and options weighed before anything becomes official, but I will definitely entertain the thought of attending qualifying for the PGA Tour Canada and spending the summer months competing there.

In addition to that, I will attempt to take a more domestic route to the Web.com Tour. Though I have heard it rumored that Monday Qualifier entry fees have been raised considerably, I will play in every Web.com Tour qualifier that makes logistical sense. I have proven that I can compete at that level, and Monday Qualifiers offer the opportunity for a breakthrough at any time. I definitely think I can play my way onto the Web.com Tour during the year, and I will be trying to do so.

There are still a great many unanswered questions heading into my 2013 competition calendar, but one thing is for sure: I am going to play a lot of tournament golf. I know that it is possible to overdo it, and I promise to be cognizant of that as the year goes on, but for now I am very excited to get started. I will post my planned events for the first couple months of the year in the tab above labeled "2013 Schedule". I will try to do a good job of keeping that tab updated a couple months in advance as plans become more concrete for the year. As of right now, I know I'll be starting the year with a couple months of mini-tour action here in the States, and I plan to get some winning ways going early!

Back to the present. Please check for a practice report at the end of the week. I'm going to try hard to finish my work goals for this week, but I'll need a major assist from some warm sunshine and then an incredibly productive weekend. I'm not one for excuses, but the pictures above are my evidence of this week's challenge! I feel great, and it's going to be a very good year. Thank you very much for keeping up with me and for your support!


Week One Done; It's Going to Be a Great Year

The East Tennessee weather could not have been more cooperative for the first week of work in my 2013 golf campaign. I established my goals for the year last week and stated that January 7 would be the beginning of my work year and the day that I would begin being accountable for weekly practice goals. I had fantastic January weather the past seven days and am incredibly pleased with the way my first official week of practice went. I finished all of my work goals, and my golf game showed some very positive signs. I feel confident that the past week is the start of what is going to be a very good year for me.

I played a lot of golf over the past week. I had two big matches to start the week on Monday and Tuesday at Holston Hills Country Club. I played fairly well in both matches, posting scores of 69 and 68. Tuesday's match was pretty intense, and my 68 actually cost me a little bit of money. I definitely had my competitive juices flowing, though, and it felt like tournament golf. I was able to have more matches the rest of the week as well. One of my former college teammates, Englishman Will Harrold, is spending a week and a half with me as he prepares for his second year of professional golf in Europe and Asia. We played a nine-hole match at Millstone, a great match at The Country Club and then two matches at Dandridge Golf Course over the weekend. After struggling on the front nine at The Country Club, I was battling hard to come back against Will, but he matched my four-under-par performance on the back nine to claim a victory from me on Thursday. I got him over the weekend at Dandridge, though. I actually had a golden opportunity to shoot 59 on Saturday as I arrived at the par-5 finishing hole needing just a birdie to reach the milestone. A nervous tee shot forced a lay-up, though, and an overly amped-up wedge for my third traveled too far. I lipped out a long-ish putt for the 59 and had to settle for a 60. Dandridge Golf Course is not an overly demanding track by any means, but I'll take a 60 on January 12th. My game showed positive signs every day this week, and I definitely feel like things are heading in the right direction.

In addition to the matches, it was a solid week of practice. I had a couple of good range sessions and did some positive work with Bobbo as we continue to hone some slight changes to my golf swing. My putting work was very good this week, and I'm excited to be back in good habits with my short game practice. I did a good job of maintaining my fitness over the Holidays, but I like my workout goals for 2013 and feel like I executed them very well in week 1. The past week was thorough, and I am pumped about the standard it has set for the year.

Great things are going to happen this year. I plan to play more than ever before, and I know that my game will rise to the occasion. My schedule will look a little bit different (in an exciting way) in 2013, and I promise to unveil my competitive plans for the year within the next week.

Thank you very much for keeping up with me. I really do appreciate your support. Keep it here for more practice reports and that preview of my 2013 schedule!

Go Time 2013!

I hope that you were all able to see the exciting news from my previous post. I am an engaged man, and I have one heck of a fiancé! I don't want to belittle the importance of that in the least because I am still incredibly excited about it, but it is time to get back into the habit of being a full-time professional golfer. Fortunately, I absolutely love what I do and have a fiancé who works just as hard as me and supports me completely, so the fact that I am getting back to work is nothing but good news!

My year of work officially begins on Monday, January 7. After a lot of thought over the past couple of days, I have completed my 2013 Goals and have published them in the tab above titled "Goals for 2013". At first glance, my goals for this year look quite similar to the ones I had in 2012. I have definitely modeled this year's goals after last year's. Some notable changes exist, however. First of all, I have re-ordered my Outcome goals to more accurately reflect my priorities. My first and most important outcome goal of 2013 is to earn full status for the Web.com Tour in 2014. Secondly, I want to find the winner's circle and become comfortable there. I expect to win at least three events on the major mini-tours this year. Lastly, if I spend the entire year playing mini-tour golf here in the states, I want to be the leading money winner on both the eGolf Professional Tour and the NGA Tour. These are lofty goals, but with the progression that I have shown over the past three years and the work that I am doing to improve, I believe that all are achievable.

I have also made some subtle but meaningful changes to my Weekly Work Goals (process goals) for 2013. My putting goals and basic short game requirements will be the same as last year, but I have added a feature to my short game work about which I am very excited. There is now a section under my short game regimen called "Tri-weekly Requirements". This section exists to heighten my focus during my short game work. It requires that every three weeks I must have at least ten chip-ins and hole at least three bunker shots. This addition should be quite do-able, but I think it will add an element of precision and intentionality to my short game work. The reason that I have this broken up into three week blocks rather than making it fit into the one-week system on which all of my practice goals are based is to accommodate for the weeks when short game facilities are lacking at tournament sites. I am excited about this addition to my weekly work goals. I have also added a ball-striking component to my weekly goals for the first time ever. This is not a huge addition, but it ensures that I practice hitting a variety of shots on the range at least a couple times per week. The rest of my process goals do look similar to last year's model with slight modifications. I think my work goals were very good last year, but the 2013 version is even better. I look forward to staying on task and doing the week-to-week work that will get me to my outcome goals.

I am going to create a couple of additional tabs here on my blog where I will track my work towards a couple of these process goals. These tabs can be found on the menu line just below the big picture at the top of my blog's home screen. Check them out from time to time and help hold me accountable for finishing my work!

I still have a lot more to say about my competitive plans for 2013, but I will end this novel for today. Come back soon for news about my 2013 schedule and practice reports as I get into full-time work mode! Thank you very much for following me and for your support. This is going to be a very good year.

My Best Shot of the Year?

I have to take a break from my usual golf-intensive posts to share some very exciting news. After more than four years of dating my sweetheart, Alicia Hatcher, I popped "the question" on December 30, and she said "Yes!" We are both heading into an extremely big year as she finishes up her Doctoral course work and begins writing her dissertation and I embark on my biggest, busiest, and best golf season yet. Therefore, we plan to wait quite a while before we start planning a wedding or setting a date, but still, we are both extremely excited about this step.

Now I don't want to brag, but I have to say that with the help of my AWESOME sister and family, I pulled off a pretty sweet engagement. I had a very whimsical idea just a week before Christmas that I could sneak Alicia down to our favorite city, Chattanooga, TN, and propose to her with a frisbee in a beautiful park on the Tennessee River. With the help of my family and especially my sister Laura, we pulled off a fantastic plan. We developed a ruse that had Alicia thinking we were driving down to my older sister Gina's house in Cartersville, Georgia, for a pre-New Year's celebration. We were in separate cars, and I told Alicia that we had time to stop off in Chattanooga for a minute. My mom, dad, and Laura were half an hour ahead of us and already in the Chattanooga when Alicia and I arrived. Alicia of course thought my parents and sister were already well into Georgia. So we parked in the city and walked the pedestrian bridge across the Tennessee river carrying a decoy frisbee. My sister had planted the real frisbee, on which I had written "Alicia 'Hatch', will you marry me?" in a bush by the River. We walked into the park and tossed the decoy frisbee around for a while as I moved us toward the bushes. When the time was right, I made the world's worst throw and tossed the decoy frisbee into the bushes. I charged into the bushes and, unbeknownst to Alicia, came out with the real frisbee. Despite it being clearly marked on the top and having an engagement ring securely fastened to the bottom, Alicia caught the real frisbee and threw it back to me three stinking times before finally seeing it on the fourth toss. She was driving me crazy! When she did see it, though, it was perfect!

Because my sister was there incognito the entire time, we have video evidence that it all really happened. If you have nine minutes to spare, check out my "smoothness" with this youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P86MYlhJXKw
Note, you must have this link to access the video, and it cannot be viewed from your cell phone for some reason.

This year will be hard for us as a couple. Alicia is tied to Missouri by her job and the final year of her Ph. D. work. I have very few opportunities to be in Missouri because my schedule is going to be very full and seldom includes stops in or near the Midwest. We are both chasing our individual dreams, but we support each other fully, and we know that our dreams have us on a path to a wonderful life together! Though I may not see her as much as I would like over the next twelve months, I am so proud, happy, and excited to announce Alicia Hatcher as my fiancé!

 

 

P.S. Golf news is coming on here very soon. By this weekend I will have my 2013 Goals posted and will give a general overview of how my schedule is going to look. I have kept my body in fantastic shape over the Holiday season, but my practice has definitely taken a back seat for the past three weeks. I'm ready to get 2013 rolling and get my game in tournament shape. Come back for golf news soon!

Lots of GREAT Stuff

That is certainly the most generic title you will ever see me give to a post. If you notice my last post (which was way too long ago), you'll see that the title would lead one to believe that this edition should be titled "The Future". Well, that post is coming, but for now, I just want to give an extremely quick overview of the past couple weeks.

My practice has been scattered and scarce for the past 15 days. I am still working on some great things and am determined to reach my ball-striking goals during this brief winter off-season, but I haven't been able to stick to a solid practice routine lately. Weather has been a reasonable excuse for my shortcomings, but more importantly, I have been soaking up time with the people that I love most in the whole world. I am so thankful for my family and for Alicia. I have had a fantastic Holiday Season thus far, and I know that there is more to come as I still have my favorite crew with me for the New Year's weekend.

With that said, I spent a couple hours with my golf clubs down in the basement today getting re-fired up for the super-productive winter that I am going to have. I still feel like the stuff on which I am working is going to make me a tremendously better ball-striker, and I am determined to start the year in mid-season form when tournament time rolls around in early February. I have a lot of work to do to achieve that goal, but I can do it and am excited to really bare down very soon!

I have some good news to share regarding my 2013 schedule and will also be publishing my 2013 process goals very soon. Monday, January 7, 2013, will be the start of my work year, and I am already pumped up for it. For now, I am keeping myself in great physical shape and soaking up the last few days of a great Holiday Season with my favorite people. I'll get after my golf again very soon!

Thank you for keeping up with me! I hope you all have had a warm Holiday Season and I wish every one a very Happy New Year! I will be back with more updates and news very soon. I am as excited as ever. Please keep it here to enjoy this continuing journey with me!

The Past, Present, And...

I am definitely in what can only be described as my offseason. I usually am very absorbed in the present. I rarely think much about the past, and I don't like to spend too much time worrying about hypothetical situations in the future. Right now, however, I am doing quite a bit of both. I have analyzed my practice logs and am doing some reflecting on the past year. At the same time, I am starting to put a lot of thought into the route I will to take to advance my game and my career in 2013. In this post, however, I want to share my findings after looking back over my 2012 season, and talk a little bit more about the exciting things that are going on right now. I am wrapping up my thoughts about the future, and I will share exciting news in that regard soon.

I apologize to those of you who are stat junkies and want me to regale you with my greens in regulation percentage and average putts per round, but I don't keep track of that. To me, a lot of stats of that nature are very misleading. As I look back on 2012, I am concerned with two main areas: my work towards my weekly process goals and my par-5 performance.

I was shocked by my findings in the first of those areas. I felt like I had a great year of work. I know that I failed to prioritize my practice the way I should have some weeks, but I thought that I had established a great work routine throughout the year. I was displeased to find that in the 44 weeks from when I published my "process goals" in early January through the last week of my season in mid-November, I failed to complete all of my process goals 15 times. That means I successfully completed all of my work goals just 65.9 percent of my work weeks this year. Often it was just one putting drill or a workout that kept me from completing my goals, but that shows a shortcoming. All-in-all, I am still very pleased with the work that I put in this year, but it was eye-opening to see how many times I came up short of my goals. I did some deeper analysis to see how my weeks looked during and immediately preceding some of my best tournament results of the year. There were no strong correlations at all as I found that some of my best tournament results followed great weeks of practice whereas a couple of very strong performances followed weeks during which I had come up very short of my practice goals. A noticeable trend from which I will learn moving forward did appear, however. On three occasions when I spent a weekend away from golf to enjoy special occasions or just fun times with special people, I performed well in the weeks that followed. I am not good enough to make a habit of taking time off, but I think I will plan three to four weekends per season to do non-golf activities moving forward. My look back at the work that I did each week this year certainly doesn't leave me disappointed, but it does show that I have a lot of room for improvement. My weekly goals this year were challenging but very reasonable. I will have a similar set of process goals next year, and you can bet that I will do a better job of completing them.

The one performance stat that I do track is par-5 scoring. Great players and tournament winners play the par 5s well, and it is not just the long hitters to whom this statement applies. At the beginning of the year, I proclaimed that I wanted to have a scoring average of 4.33 on par 5s for the year. Some of my buddies told me that was not a realistic goal. I tried to use their doubts as motivation and set out to prove them wrong. They weren't. I am disappointed with my performance on the par 5s this year, but 4.33 was not a realistic goal. I played 409 par 5s this year in tournament play and was 151 under par on them. That works out to an average of 4.63. I am now convinced that 4.33 is an unrealistic expectation, but 4.5 is a lofty yet very reasonable goal. To achieve a 4.5 average, I would have needed to shave 54 shots off of my total for the 409 par 5s I played. That means I have a lot of work to do in this area. To play the par 5s better, I need to develop more confidence in my ball-striking and continue to hone my wedge play. You can bet that par-5 scoring will be on my list of goals again for 2013, and I am going to improve dramatically in that area.

The only other process goal I made that deserves a year-end mention is my "friendly match" winnings. I need to nurture a more competitive instinct in myself, so I wrote down a goal to profit $500 in friendly matches and practice round bets this year. I did keep up with this throughout the year, and I liked having this goal, but I don't play enough matches or play for enough money to reach $500 in friendly match winnings. I had a rough stretch in early-year practice rounds, but I was still finished the year up near $200 in this category. I will have a goal along these lines again next year.

That details my year-end findings regarding my process goals. I know that stuff might not seem like the most relevant information, but to me it is quite informative and useful. I will use it to shape my process goals for next year and as motivation to improve.

As for my 2012 outcome goals, I think most of you know I came up short on all three counts. I expected to have multiple wins on the eGolf Professional Tour. I won once. I expected to finish the year first on the eGolf Professional Tour's Money List. I finished fourth. I expected to end the season with full status for 2013 on at least Web.com Tour. I did not. This is disappointing news, but it was a GREAT year! All of my goals were very doable, and I made a great run at them. The fact that I came up short will motivate me to work harder and smarter than ever. I will have bigger and better goals for 2013, and I'm ready to start achieving them!

That is enough looking backwards. I have a lot going on right now. I am entrenched in some swing changes that are going to increase my competence as a ball-striker. I have never liked the idea of making changes to my golf swing, but my ball-striking is the only area of my game that hasn't improved significantly in the past three years, so I am committing to a change this winter. I am confident that I will improve and become much more consistent as a ball-striker. I am already seeing positive signs, and can't wait until things start feeling comfortable. While I am working hard on my golf swing, I am continuing to sharpen my short game and putting. I feel that these areas of my game are strong, but I have plenty of room to keep improving. When my swing changes become fully engrained, I want to feel like I am tournament-ready. My current work definitely has me on track to make that a reality. In addition to putting good work into my golf game, I have ramped up my fitness work over the past two weeks as well. I am feeling strong, fit, and flexible. As I said in the opening of this post, it is definitely my off season right now, but I am doing a lot of exciting and important work.

So there is a look and the past and the present. I still have a little bit more information to gather and thinking to do before I go to in-depth about plans for the future, but the wheels are turning in that direction. Keep it here for practice reports and an exciting look towards what is coming next year. Thank you so much for following me and for your support. Here's to a warm winter--literally and figuratively!

Major Progress

In the week that followed my disappointing exit from this year's PGA Tour Q-school, I did some some serious thinking about my golf game. My year as a whole had been quite good. My results were very good and quite consistent, and I further confirmed that my career is on a good trajectory. Something just wasn't right about the way my season ended, though. It wasn't just that I played poorly at the Second Stage of Q-school; it was more a realization of the fact that no amount of positive thinking could have helped me overcome the poor ball-striking week that I had that final week of my season. To take that thought a step farther, I came to the realization that every single aspect of my game has improved greatly over the past three years except for the consistency of my ball-striking. My chipping, putting, wedge play, course management, and tournament mentality have all improved steadily and significantly over the past three years, but my ball-striking is still inconsistent at best and downright troubling at times. While I certainly have weeks where I hit the ball well enough to succeed, I would still say that I am successful in spite of, rather than because of, my ball-striking. Therefore, I decided it is time to make some changes.

I still don't believe there is such a thing as a perfect golf swing, but I do believe there are things I can do with my golf swing to improve the quality and consistency of my ball-striking. I had a meeting with Bobbo to see if he was on board to help me make some changes over the winter months, and he sure was. He had some ideas right away, and after a good talk to make sure we were on the same page, we got to work last Sunday. The changes felt dramatic at first, and the task seemed daunting, but after just nine days of really hard work (and, thankfully, beautiful weather!), I am already starting to see signs that we are on the right track. I don't know the golf swing very well, and I don't like to get too technical, but I will try to share with you my understanding of the changes that I am making.

I am happy to say that I do have a firm understanding of what I am doing and the reasons that the changes will help me improve. The first thing that I am doing is increasing the amount of forward shaft lean that I have at impact. I have always struggled with releasing the club a little bit too early on the downswing, which allows the club head to pass my hands at or even before impact resulting in a weak and inconsistent strike. To fix this problem, I am working hard to quiet my hands and let my body turn pull the club through the hitting area. The other change that I am making is my first move in the downswing. I have spent years hitting three-quarter, controlled shots. While that sounds like a good thing, I have become very content just to make a controlled "all-arms" swing with no lower-body drive at all. If I want to make a strong body turn into and through impact, I need to initiate my downswing with a strong leg drive toward the target. When I start my downswing with my lower-body, it allows my body turn to deliver the club squarely and consistently to the ball. Incorporating these two changes into to golf swing will greatly increase my competence as a ball-striker.

Just nine days into this process, I am already starting to see results. When Bobbo and I talked before we started working, I gave him a list of four things I was looking to accomplish with any changes we would make: 1.) Deveolop the belief that I always hit the ball solidly. 2.) Improve the sound of my iron shots--go from a "wipey, clicky" sound to a crisp, flush one. 3.) Learn what it means and feels like to "compress" the golf ball. 3.) Add ten yards per iron and at least ten yards of carry with my driver. I am not comfortable enough with the changes yet to say that I have accomplished any of these goals, but I am starting to hit some shots that definitely meet the middle two goals and hint that the first and fourth are very possible. I have a lot more work to do, but things are feeling great and I am very excited!

While I'm working on these improvements to my swing, I am also taking time to keep my short game and putting sharp. My goal is to hit the ground running in 2013 without the warm-up period that I have seemed to need in the first couple months of my previous competitive years. Like I said, I still have a lot of work to do before I will feel fully ready to unveil my swing changes, but I am confident that this winter will go down as the most productive time in my golfing life to date.

I have finally reviewed my practice logs from 2012 and do have some pretty relevant information to share, but I'll cut off this post for now before it turns into a novel. I'm going to keep making great strides as a ball-striker, so come back soon for an update on that and to hear some more in-depth analysis of my 2012 season. I have so much to accomplish moving forward, but I am heading in a great direction.

Thank you for following me and for your continued support and encouragement!