This past weekend was our men’s amateur tournament; all in all it was a good event with 164 competitors. It started on Friday with a practise round with a twist. It was a shot gun start and the three low net scores on each hole counted towards your foursome’s total score. Everyone paid $5 to get in for a total of $820 purse. I think it was split 3 or 4 ways. Anyways our foursome was 15 under going into #18, and we had a colossal melt down. We gave back 5 strokes on this par 5 to finish at 10 under (what a screw up) 15 under par won it, all we had to do was get 1 point and we should have easily done that on a par 5. In the end we made $50 bucks each.
The tournament started on Saturday, for some reason they decided to start the round on the back nine both days. They wanted everyone to finish beside the clubhouse on #9, which makes sense to do this on Sunday. Our #10 is a short narrow par 4, 330 yds. So most of the guys teeing off were in trouble right off the bat. This lead to long delays. By the time my tee time came around they were 1hour and 10 minutes behind. I was supposed to tee off @ 12:46pm and didn’t go until 1:55pm. Everyone was getting quite annoyed by the time they teed off. I was pretty anxious to get going and the delay didn’t bother me. I started out well and ended up 1 over on the back nine, with a 38(par is 37). I lost my focus on the front side and started out double bogey, bogey, triple bogie, bogey, then I was 1 over on the last 5 holes and shot 43, 8 over on this side (par 35). I shot 81 gross and 73 net. (8 cap)
First’s day stats.
36 putts, 11 GIR’s, 8/14 fairways, 1/6 up& downs, 1/1 sand saves, avg. driving distance 298.5 yards.
Sunday day 2
Things were running a lot more smoothly this day, I believe because everyone had seen the 10th hole, this time so they were more prepared. Anyway they were only running 15 minutes behind today. I got off to a good start again and shot a 2 over par 39 on this side. Then moving to the front side #’s 1,2,3 jumped up and got me again, I went double, double, bogey the I settled down but made another double on #7 because of a bad drive. I made a real nice birdie at 8 but it was too little too late. I shot 42 to come in with another 81. My gross score for the 2 days was 162 and my net was 146, I missed out on the prizes by 1 stroke.
Day 2 stats, 30 putts, 7 GIR’s, 6/14 fairways, 2/9 up and downs, 0/2 sand saves, avg. driving distance 289.2 yards.
I was in the 0 to 8 handicap flight, so I felt I didn’t have much of a chance at the overall low gross. It was certainly not the result I was looking for, but you have to learn from your mistakes and build on the positives of each round. Playing the way I did on the back nine (3 over par for 2 days) is a big positive because this is definitely the harder nine. This was my first tournament this year, which didn’t help but I will be back at this event next year.
