Mountains and Valleys

I have been enthralled by the amount of support that I have received since announcing my newsletter a few weeks ago. I am so excited that so many have shown their support already and am humbled that they would take the time to read what I have to say. The responses I have received whether through myself or my family members telling me about people telling them about their enthusiasm for what I will be writing about is heartwarming. If anything stands out to you and you want to talk to me more or have any feedback please feel free to write me back - I will read and respond to any emails I come across!

I want to make this newsletter enjoyable for everyone and maybe help others learn something about golf along the way. All levels of golf knowledge will be taken into account when I write, so if something is too in depth or very basic to your understanding of golf, that is okay. You do not have to understand everything or can get a refresher on some basics. I will go into depth about golf mechanics and mental parts of the game throughout my posts to give as much insight as I can to higher level players, and if you do not understand that is okay. I can always answer questions but just know that most of it is just insight and is not vital to understand what this journey is about. Please do not let golf jargon discourage you from reading as it is there to make this as authentic as I can.

I also want to take a moment to recognize Tessa Welch. She designed my logo and I really love it. If you look closely, you will see that there are golf clubs inside my initials. I will continue to promote her work as she continues her graphic design career.

Current play

I have been playing and preparing a lot for summer golf the last few weeks. Two weeks ago I set the course record again at Idle Hour with a 65 and then followed that up with tying the record two more times that week. I made my first professional golf purchase, a Bushnell Launch Pro Launch Monitor. With the use of the launch monitor, I have already seen improvements in my carry distances and approach shots and have improved my arsenal of shots that I can hit on approaches. The big news the last few weeks has been my PGA Tour Canada Qualifier. I shot 76, 72, 74, 73 and did not qualify but I did learn a lot. I was very thankful that both my parents got to come down and be with me and my dad was able to caddie by the grace of God! If you did not know, my dad had pulmonary embolisms in his lungs in March and was hospitalized. We were unsure if he was even going to make it. He is the strongest person I know and was not only able to make a full recovery, but he was able to do it in time to caddie for me in the 90 degree heat. He has been my number one supporter since I started and believed in me even when I did not believe in myself, so having him on the bag at the start of my professional golf journey was such a blessing and a memory I will cherish for the rest of my life.

The rest of the summer will be focused around the southeast playing in tournaments in order to prepare for when the real tests start in the fall. I will cover what that qualifying looks like and the different paths I am considering in the next newsletter. For now, I was able to go and work with my swing coach in Orlando, Daniel Gray, on some much need swing changes in order to lower my scores as it was primarily my inability to hit fairways at my qualifier that kept me from qualifying. One of the areas that we focused on was the tightness in my hips that I was unaware of which hindered my backswing and caused my timing to be off. I know have several drills which I am using to improve the tightness in my hips.

Mountains

As some of you know, I qualified for the 2022 United States Amateur in July of 2022, going into my senior year of college. For context, over 7,000 scratch golfers attempt to qualify and 300 make it each year. It is the most prestigous amateur event in the world. It was a huge honor just to to qualify. I qualified at the Georgia Southern University Course with rounds of 74-65. The weather was brutal, raining on and off most of the tournament causing the conditions of the course to be very wet. When golf courses are wet they will generally let the players mark their ball after each shot, pick it up and clean it, to get the mud off of the ball because mud makes the ball spin in an unpredictable manner and can cause luck to be too much of a factor in determining outcome of tournaments. The United States Golf Association hates the ruling of allowing players to clean their balls in between shots and takes pride in never allowing it in a single event they have ever run. To say there were mudballs this event was an understatement. I had numerous but was able to play through it both days. The University course at Georgia Southern is already a very difficult golf course, but add in the elements and the scores were extremely high. I remember sitting at dinner with my dad after my first round 74 (+2) and saying that if I went out and shot a 67 (-5) the next day I would have a legitimate chance at making it even though I was currently sitting in 30th place with only 6 spots up for grabs at the qualifier. Little did I know that I was going to play flawless golf that next day.

I started off the round with a 3 putt bogey from 10 feet on hole number 10 but never got down on myself and just kept going along. I made a few good birdies on 11 and 12 and then birdied 14. I made the turn at 2 under and rattled off 4 birdies in my next 5 holes only for the horn to sound due to inclement weather with me having 3 holes left. I checked the leaderboard and was one shot inside the cut line but knew I had two very difficult holes coming up. Having to sit in the clubhouse after having played some of the best golf of my life was excruciating. Finally after an almost two hour delay I got to go back out and finish my round. I bogeyed my first hole back but then birdied my last hole to make it. Hugging my dad walking off that green was something I will never forget. Little did I know that golf would take a turn on me and teach me a lot about myself.

Valleys

After I qualified I had a few weeks to prepare for the event and had a whirlwind of questions to answer from everyone. I was very excited and nervous but generally did not know what to expect. My family drove up to New Jersey with me for the week. It was incredible. They treated us like royalty, everyone knew my name and I got more cool gear than I knew what to do with. The golf course was the hardest course I have ever played to this day with rough up to my knees and greens that were like putting on glass. It was such a hard course that the practice round took 7 ½ hours because people were losing so many golf balls in the rough. The first round tested me unlike any round I had ever played. Everything started off fine being 1 over through 3 holes but then one simple mistake and I quickly made triple without a penalty shot and the world started coming at me faster than I could fathom. Mistakes compounded on each other and before I knew it the round had gotten away from me. I managed to shoot 91 without losing a single golf ball. My confidence was shattered and I was in shock. My girlfriend, Sophie, flew up to support and said that my face was white and I was speechless after the round. Most of it is now a daze for me. I proved that I belonged there by bouncing back and shooting 74 the next day on greens that had gotten up to a 15 on the stimp meter, quite a bit faster than Augusta Nationals greens for the Masters but the damage had been done. I returned to Georgia and was immediately thrown into my senior season not having time to process what had happened to me in New Jersey and as you can imagine I played very poorly that fall. After qualifying and improving dramatically over my junior season with multiple top 10s in tournaments and then having a good summer including a few top 5s in amateur events along with qualifying for the US Amateur as the cherry on top, my identity had fully become immersed in my golf game. The US Amateur shook me to my core but I did not even realize it yet. All that I cared about for months was trying to get my scores back to what they should be and get in the lineup that fall at Mercer to build my identity back up through playing well. I knew that in order to improve I needed to make some changes in my golf swing but I was so worried about scores I decided that offseason to just make some bandaid fixes to some problems that needed some real changes mechanically in my swing. ( I will get to those changes later on.) It was like the flex seal memes where the guy has a giant tub of water and fixes it with a small piece of tape to stop the leaking when he really needs to change the whole container before it comes crashing down. The Bandaid worked and I shot 68-67-71 and came in 3rd in an amateur event in Alabama that winter. My identity was back and I was confident again, for now. Spring season rolled around and I started to play a lot better and qualified for the lineup to play at Palmetto golf club. The final day of that event was when things came to a tipping point.

The round started out just like my round at the US Am with a boring start but then a couple of bad swings compounded and everything started to speed up in my head. My anxiety got so bad during the round that I could not feel my legs when I was walking down the fairways. I wrote in my journal that night that it was almost like I had forgotten how to hit a golf ball and was playing a foreign game. I also came to the realization that day that golf was not the most important thing and that I had lost myself in it. I seriously considered whether I should continue playing after that round and how bad it affected me mentally but after much praying and talking to those around me I realized how much I still loved golf. If I was going to continue however, things had to change and nothing was off the table.

I tell you that long story to show you the mountains and valleys that come with high level competitive golf. You’d think that hitting a stationery ball into a hole would not be that hard but golf has been proven to be one of the most mentally taxing activities that a person can take part in, and competition golf is another animal. Luckily that is not where the story ends.

Climbing out of the Valley

When realizing that I wanted to continue to play but things had to change, I re- evaluated everything in my game. I first reached out to Trey Mixon, a teammate of mine who was supportive throughout my entire struggle and a great guy in general, and asked to introduce me to his mental coach, Josh Spell. Josh has helped me in so many ways. I will share snippets of his insight in later posts. He has been supportive of me but most importantly, he cares about the man I become over just being a better golfer. I think that is why we get along so well. After beginning that work, I went back and combed through everything I was taught about the golf swing and tried to understand what they had told me and what I could implement to make that work for my own game. I made a lot of changes and broke down a lot of my misconceptions about the swing all the way down to changing my grip from interlock to overlap because it gave me more connection in my hands. I took complete ownership and made it all my own. Rather than changing what made me a good golfer, I refined it and identified what I did well and what I did poorly so that I could continue to progress as a golfer. I will not go into detail on this newsletter on the changes I made as it would make the newsletter too lengthy but if that is something that people want to hear I can talk about it in a later addition. Just let me know. Through all of this work I am more confident than I have ever been, about golf and about life. I believe that confidence comes through proper preparation and figuring out areas of my game and taking ownership has given me that confidence to excel.

I have had people ask me if I wish I hadn’t gone through what I did. With those challenges I was able to come to the conclusions that I have made to get better and I tell them no without hesitation. How I perform is no longer how I identify my self worth. Of course, I will slip up and let it define me but I am able to identify that and change it. I have people around me to hold me accountable to not let it define who I am. I learned a lot about myself and I look at my failure at the US Am and throughout the rest of that year as a badge of honor. It taught me a lot about myself and helps me keep things in perspective when I think I am having a bad day on the course. I now enjoy practicing more than I ever have and am excited to go and learn new things about how I can get better as a person and player. My life verse, that I have written at the top of this letter, is what I think about when I play tournament rounds. There will always be struggles in tournament rounds, but they show us who we are and if used correctly they can teach us about how we are and strengthen our faith in the Lord. Having pure joy over trials is a lot harder than you think, but having that verse reminds me to strive for it.

Ministry thoughts

I reached out to a few people about potential topics not related to golf to cover in my newsletter and a response I got made me think. They said that I should talk about what I think ministry could look like. Of course, there are many ways to minister to those around you, but after many years of being a YoungLife leader, the one that I believe is the most effective is by living a life that intrigues others. I believe that a lot of nonbelievers see that people who claim to be Christians are living lives too similar to theirs and therefore they think that they should not change their lifestyle and look into christianity because it doesn’t seem to be different. My favorite speaker that I reference very often is Inky Johnson. He was an all American linebacker about to go into the NFL when he ruptured a cercadian artery in his chest and paralyzed his right arm and hand after making a tackle at the end of a game. The quote that gets me when he gets asked whether he would change what happened to him is, “sometimes people don’t need you to preach a sermon, they need you to live one.” If you are around nonbelievers, and you treat them how Jesus told us to treat others, by loving and caring for them, let them bring it up to you. Of course, never avoid the conversations if they naturally come up, but do not preach to them, show them. A book I’ve been reading, Chop Wood Carry Water by Joshua Medcalf says that “the difference between a guest and a pest is an invitation.” Jesus did not hang out with the righteous and then go and preach to sinners. Rather he hung out with sinners and through genuine interactions with them he showed them how they could live a better life and how they could have eternal life. Of course we are all sinners and will come up short, but I challenge those reading this to look at your life and think that if someone who had never heard of Jesus would look at you and be intrigued by how you live life or would they think that you are of this world as well? Please do not take this and think you have to flaunt that you live differently from the world as that will be even more counter productive than preaching but it is something that I have been thinking about a lot recently.

Financials

I am currently finalizing my tournament schedule and budget for the year for monetary needs. I have had a few people tell me personally that they want to help me financially and I plan on reaching out to them after I finish my budget and schedule. If you have a business that you would want advertised on myself, my bag or this newsletter, please email me at [email protected].