Mid-Season Goal Review

15 Aug

Now I know what you’re saying - “we are almost at the end of the season”! But bear with me as I kind of forgot to do this earlier in the year and (with any luck) the weather will be warmer well into October which will extend things slightly before winter kicks in.

Welcome to 54 to Scratch, the weekly blog following this golfers dream of starting as an adult beginner and becoming something resembling a half decent golfer.

So at the beginning of the year, I set myself a number of targets, setting both longer term goals and also goals for this year specifically.

Starting with my 2023 goals, they were as follows:

1. Play Bogey Golf (Reach 18 Handicap)

2. Play my first singles competition

3. Create an established golf blog! :)

Play Bogey Golf:

Breaking this down, I can’t say I’m happy with where I am at this stage of the year. I still have another 4 and a half months, but realistically - I’ve got until end of October to improve enough to get this.

There are obviously some reasons behind this. The most obvious is that I switched coach mid way through the year. Switching from one coach to another, focusing on different things, obviously put me back slightly as there have been plenty of rounds where I was thinking of all the things I needed to focus on and fluffed chances.

This was definitely the right decision though and I feel like this minor setback will bear fruit longterm.

I’ve been on purple patches and seen my handicap come down though. At the start of the year, my handicap was 25. It’s now 22.8. So I can be happy with the fact that I’ve shown progress.

But there is definitely a lingering thought that I could have done better. I’ve played enough golf to. But my decision making has been terrible at times, as has my mental game (which last year had gotten pretty good).

This goal is still achievable, but will require a lot of focus over the next few weeks. Thankfully, I’ve put the hitting the ground business behind me and have been playing pretty good the past few rounds, so hopefully I can kick on from here.

Play my first singles competition:

This is an interesting one as I’m unsure how to define this. I think when I set this goal, I was hoping to be in a better position sooner with my handicap.

As I’ve talked about before, I am a strange one when it comes to certain social situations, so this goal was always going to rely on my confidence to put myself into situations to achieve it.

However, there is still plenty of time to get involved. I’ve just been added to the competitions whatsapp group and I will consider this as completed if I take part in the weekly swindle.

I also need to look out for competitions that you can enter. There was one recently at Tudor park that I got invited to where the qualifiers would play the Belfry, but unfortunately I couldn’t make the date work for the initial event, which was a shame.

Again, this goal is completely achievable and I should do this in the next couple of weeks.

Create an Established Golf Blog:

Well, if you’re reading this then it’s established I guess… Ha!

In all seriousness, my focus and plan definitely shifted early on to become more about Instagram. I’ve managed to grow my following nicely (at the time of writing, just over 3000 followers), although the engagement levels could be a little better, which is what I’m trying to focus on now.

This blog itself is serving it’s purpose, it acts as a mechanism for me to get my thoughts down on paper (figuratively) and if people are reading it, then that’s great (and I thank anyone who takes the time to read!)

So - on to the larger goals:

The BHAG I set myself was:

Become a single handicapper before I’m 40

Become a valued member of a Club team before I’m 40

So with both of these, I’m not sure if I’ve taken the steps needed to do either, but time will tell. I definitely need to step these up, and at the end of the year will definitely be adjusting/adding to them.

As it is, any 39th birthday is not very far away, so I have a little over a year to achieve these. Both are definitely achievable, I just need to continue to put the work in both on and off the course.

I’ve recently taken a delivery of a ShotScope X5, a golf performance watch with tracking tags. I’m hoping that this will start to help me make different decisions as I will have a deeper understanding of my capabilities from a data perspective. For anyone that’s been thinking about getting one, I couldn’t recommend more, I’ll do a review once I’ve used it a few more times, but if you enter the coupon code 54TOSCRATCH at checkout on ShotScope’s website, you can get 15% off.

Hopefully, those of you reading this have had a good year so far, still plenty of golf to play (especially if you aren’t a fair weather golfer), so looking forward to the rest of this year!

Have a great game everyone!