Since we last spoke, God’s faithfulness has shown up in many areas of my life. Between good golf, going to Passion, and having people constantly showing support of my journey, I truly have felt blessed.

I have played a couple of events since last updating everyone and I recently have been on the road for 11 days by myself in South Florida. I will tell you, being by yourself that long really makes you learn a lot about yourself. You either grow or you go backwards! My game is continuing to show signs of improvement have a T-9 finish at Belle Meade (69-69-70) and a 6th finish at the MLGT tour event at PGA National Matchplay Course (64). there have been difficult tournaments as well, going through a swing change in early January caused two difficult tournaments including one that I withdrew from due to equipment failure and minor injury. I am blessed to have gotten them all worked out and am excited for the upcoming tournaments and prepping for the bigger qualifying tournaments in May and June.

I have been fortunate enough to have gone to Passion conference in Atlanta at the start of every year for the past 5 years with my mentor family, the Chans. If you have not heard of passion conference it is a conference for 18-25 year olds and their mentors to get together in either Mercedes Benz stadium or State Farm Arena in Atlanta. Participants hover between 35,000-70,000. At the event, speakers come to tell us hard truths but also encourage us in our walks of faith. I am currently writing a post about a topic from passion that has impacted me in more ways than I can count. Be on the lookout for that in the next few weeks.

I also really want to thank Idle Hour Country Club, the Board, and all the members for graciously providing me with a professional membership status so that I can continue to practice at the club. The facilities and people have made me into the player and person I am and am thankful that I can continue to grow out there and get better. I was fortunate enough to play 5 years of Division 1 golf at Mercer University and during that time I learned a lot from my own experiences and the athletes with which I made friends. I want this post to be an encouragement to those going through college athletics now, as well as an enlightening piece for those who may go in the future or have dreams of going.

Partnership

Since golf is now my job, my team and I have had discussions about me spending time doing other hobbies that I enjoy. There is nothing better to me than being out on the lake and waterskiing. Having a nice place to stay is icing on the cake! I cannot recommend using Swift Lake Rentals for your summer lake getaway more. Their properties and amenities are outstanding. Check them out!

I have gotten to know the Swift family well through the years and I have enjoyed watching Phillips Swift mature as we work together on our golf games. Phillips is following in my footsteps and will be playing at Mercer starting in the fall. I could not be happier for him. I am proud to partner with and represent Swift Lake Rentals.

I also attached me skiing last summer at the bottom of the newsletter if you would like to see it.

The Realities of College Athletics

Maybe it is just my social media feed but I am constantly getting videos of people saying college athletics ruined their love of their sport. I would be lying if I told you that I did not go through a season like that.

If you are like me, your sport was your escape from reality when you were younger. Every day I would be in school looking up videos of golf highlights watching guys on the PGA tour hit these amazing shots and I would be so excited to go out and try to recreate the shots and the scenarios in my head. I would think about my swing and every facet of the game all day and many times would dream about golf. I truly loved everything about the game. The solitude, quietness was an escape from every day life. I still have over 9 holes that I designed around my house (no more than 50 yards long as that was the length of the yard) that I would chip around for hours on Mondays when the golf course was closed. I was blessed to naturally be good at it so that pushed me even more to keep playing.

Eventually, I was offered a scholarship to play in college. I talked to many different coaches who were very nice and tried to win me to their school, showing me all the amazing parts of college golf. Once I made it to school, the reality of what college golf looked like set in. Everyone around me was just as good, if not better than me, and golf was the whole reason I was at school. You have to perform to keep your spot. No longer could I escape the hard parts of middle and high school by going to the golf course. Suddenly, golf was the ultimate stressor in my life. I wasn’t itching to go practice and was avoiding watching anything related to golf because it caused me more stress. God gave me a quick reality check on my identity and showed me that golf truly is just a game. At the time, golf was life or death to me. A good day on the golf course meant I could be happy and the opposite was also true. I was practicing out of obligation and all that mattered in my head were the results. This is the reality of collegiate sports. They are inherently a business and are cut throat. If you are not prepared for that and do not get off your high horse of thinking that you are amazing at the sport just because of your career up until college, you will struggle a lot and most likely will start to hate your sport. College is a clean slate. The high school accolades no longer matter and you have to prove that you are still improving.

Something that many people don’t talk about is the bitterness that comes with finally getting to the school. When being recruited, you only see the dolled up good things about each university, and you choose which one you believe is best for you. The coaches really recruit you and tell you all these great things, are extremely nice to you and tell you how amazing you are and inflate your ego. Once you get there you get a full scope of reality. Because we live in a broken world there are always things about every place that aren’t going to be great and when you’ve only been shown the best of the best in order to convince you to come, reality hits harder than it normally would and it is easy to become bitter. I saw it with many different athletes. They thought that they were immediately going to come in and play and be a superstar like the coach had told them but in reality they were going to need time to develop and get better before they could actually play. When you get into this mindset it is easy to start looking at all the bad things about the place you are in and it can spiral. A lot of athletes who transfer or quit had this exact thing happen to them and when you ask, they generally will say that it wasn’t what they thought it would be or you see the bitterness in their face.

I don’t want you to think that I regret my decision to go to Mercer because I thoroughly enjoyed my time there and would make the decision again today in a heartbeat as I believe it was in God’s plan to put me there for reasons that go beyond just golf, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t things that upset me and challenged me and my morale. Looking back, the things that upset me were crucial to my development for who I am today. Because of all of my lows, the highs are that much better. Through time and checking my identity, my love for the game, and my genuine curiosity all came back in full force. Practice became fun again because I stopped thinking so short term and understood that change takes longer than a couple of days and putting in consistent, quality work would get me where I needed to go rather than bandaid fixes that will help me hit it well for a week or two. I touched on this in my instagram post a few weeks ago by showing my swing evolution that began when I took ownership over my whole game and decided to stick to a long term plan to get myself swinging the club more efficiently. Go check out that post if you haven’t already. I think more importantly, because of the trials that God has allowed me to go through, I have become a much stronger golfer and person. People quit because they forget why they do what they do. I remember 12 year old Jay standing on the putting green hitting putts dreaming of winning the Masters over and over. I want to make that kid’s dream come true, that is part of my why. If you don’t have a strong why then when the hardship comes you will hang it up. Always remember the why.

Reflection

I have done a lot of reflecting on this past year and the 8 months it has been since I turned professional. Seeing myself grow and improve as a person, not just a golfer, has been the most rewarding thing about my time so far as a professional. I am fortunate enough to have a very supportive family who helped me with the smaller details when I was growing up and now handling everything myself and running my brand company has been a learning curve but also a great experience. I am working on a few newsletters that will be more in-depth on a lot of what God is teaching me through all of this that I am very excited to share.

As far as golf goes my game is continuing to show a lot of improvement. Working hard on all different facets such as nutrition, stretching/activation/workouts, swing mechanics, and mental fortitude have helped me improve but made me realize there is a lot left that I can improve. To most that may be a daunting task, but knowing that there is a lot of potential still there for me to improve and I am having some success gives me great confidence. I am excited for this year and very excited to share everything I have been learning!

Prayer Requests

I realized a few weeks ago while practicing that I have not asks for prayer over my journey yet in this newsletter. I believe in the power of prayer and hope that you will pray for me to continue to stay disciplined and keep my priorities straight, through success and failure. I also hope that you would pray that my goals and vision is more long term as this is a long road ahead and getting caught up in quick success will only set me back. Thank you so much!

Final acknowledgements

I am very excited to start sharing my partnerships with my newsletter readers. If you have an interest in partnering with me please email me at [email protected]. If you do not want to be included in the newsletter, no worries there are plenty of avenues for our partnership!

God Bless,

Jay