Personal collective of ideas, thoughts and notes
Aside from all the courses I have been lucky enough to play, I think these are still my Top 10 courses I am wanting to play:
| Course | Location |
| Whistling Straits | Kohler, WI |
| Erin Hills | Erin, WI |
| Augusta National | Augusta, GA |
| Bandon Dunes (Multiple Courses) | Bandon, OR |
| Pebble Beach | Pebble Beach, CA |
| Shadow Creek | Las Vegas, NV |
| St. Andrews | St. Andrews, Scotland |
| Bethpage State Park: Black | Farmingdale, NY |
| TPC Sawgrass |
Majority of golf rounds played since 2012.
This was a short lived, fun start up idea I had around creating personalized and custom stickers for golf clubs. The idea was spurred as a culmination of three problems:
First, leaving a club out on the course somewhere is very common and easy to do, but getting the club back … is not as easy. Often you only find out that you lost it days, or weeks later, and then having to call the golf course, describe the club, day, and location that it was lost, is a tedious and stressful job. when a set of clubs can cost well over $1,000 and a replacement often costing around $120. By having at least your name, and optionally your phone number on the club, it dramatically increases the chances of you getting your lost item back.
Dave Pelz is one of the best golf instructors in the world, and he invented a short game and putting game to test, and score, your short game skills to gauge progress and improvement. I was given this during one of his short game clinics in Atlanta and have been using it to quantify my improvements.
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it
Here are some of my scores from the Short Game Test:
| Date | 3/4 Wedge | 1/2 Wedge | Long Sand | Short Sand | Long Chip – FW | Short Chip – FW | Pitch – FW | Pitch – Rough | Cut Lob – Rough | Total Points | HCP |
| 10 balls (yards) | 30 – 70 | 20 – 40 | 16 – 35 | 7 – 15 | 15 – 30 | 7 – 14 | 10 – 20 | 10 – 20 | 10 – 20 | ||
| 6/21/2018 – Hole 6 | 2 (50) | 4 (30) | 2 (20) | 7 (15) | 4* | 7 (20) | 13 (15) | 9 (15) | 0 (20) | 48 | 20 |
| 7/3/2018 – Hole 1 | 0 (60) | 7 (30) | 6 (20) | 10 (15) | 7 | 13 | 6 | 15 | 7 | 71 | 13 |
| 7/18/2018 – Hole 2 | 2 (50) | 3 (30) | 1 (24) | 5 (15) | 10 (20) | 18 (7) | 8 (1) | 15 | 5 | 67 | 14 |
| 7/23/2018 – Hole 18 | 1 (50) | 5 (30) | 0 (25) | 9 (15) | 11 | 21 (15) | 12 (15) | 13 (22) | 13 (20) | 85 | 9 |
| 7/26/2018 – Hole 12 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 10 | 4 | 18 | 24 | 21 | 3 | 85 | 9 |
| 7/31/2018 – Hole 6 | 2 (70) | 1 (50) | 1 (40) | 7 (15) | 4 (30) | 28 (12) | 13 (18) | 19 (18) | 7 (10) | 82 | 10 |
| 8/28/2018 – Mixed 14/15 | 1 (70) | 8 | 2 | 14 | 1 (30) | 20 (8) | 16 (20) | 18 (20) | 11 (20) | 91 | 7 |
| 9/4/2018 – Hole 2 | 0 (90) | 3 (70) | 3 (35) | 9 (10) | 5 (30) | 9 (10) | 14 | 11 | 11 | 65 | 14 |
I have collected well over 30 yardage books from all over the world. Most of them from bucket list courses like Pinehurst #2, Harbor Town or one of my favorite courses, The Ocean Course at Kiawah. But sometimes courses didnt offer or sell them, so I started down the rabbit hole of designing and printing my own.
Majority of them were for tournaments I played in on the Golfweek Amateur Tour. The design process included using Google Maps to get an aerial photo of the course, and then subsequently outlining each hole using Adobe Illustrator and vector shapes. Then measuring and taking the yardages from the course and annotating the map.
Book size: 3.75″ x 6.5”
The one day the weakest part of my golf game, won me something … at the PGA Championship at Quail Hollow. I won an autographed flag and some other Omega swag.
