Eye On The Birdie – Post #11 The Importance of Practice 

  I almost forgot to write a post this weekend! I just remembered earlier today. As you can see, this post is about the importance of practice. I feel a little hypocritical writing this, because I haven’t golfed since last Tuesday. (I’m writing this on Sunday, June 4.) Tuesday was the first PGA Junior League practice! I, sadly, have aged out, so this year I’m acting as a mentor. I also golfed on Memorial Day and Saturday. Saturday was uneventful, and I’ll be focusing on Monday in this post. On Memorial Day, I went golfing at Riverview with my dad and a couple of his friends from work. I don’t think I had been to Riverview since the high school spring season ended! I was pretty unprepared. Civitan is a great course, but it’s not a great place to practice your long game (which, as it turned out, I really needed to work on). I struggled with my three fairway driver the entire time. Also, the greens were way faster than I was expecting. I came away with a total score of 123 (which is a really cool number, but not one you want as a golf score). The incredible part is that I got four pars! The other incredible part is that I got two twelves! (The luckiest part is that my finger wasn’t stung by a wasp untilI I sunk a par putt on hole 18!) So, I was rather out of practice. I count myself lucky that I didn’t go over double par! The facts that are relevant to this post, however, are the placement of my pars and twelves. Since I recycled the scorecard, I don’t know exactly which holes I got pars on. I can say that my first par was on hole twelve, and my twelves were both prior to that. Therefore, my game drastically improved as the day went on. The longer I played, the more I had practiced, and the more I practiced, the better I did! So, practice makes better. (Not perfect. The perfect score in golf is eighteen, and that’s impossible for me at this time.) This is where I’m going to bring one of the First Tee’s core values, perseverance, into it. Needless to say, I was pretty discouraged when I strayed into the double digits. I kind of wanted to start over on hole one and play hole one over and over again until I got a par. (I like things to be perfect and consistent. Twelve was not perfect, and I wasn’t about to make it consistent.) So, since I couldn’t do that, the circumstances forced me to persevere. I didn’t really want to persevere at the time. It’s just that that was the best choice. After all, I have experienced enough to know that the next hole I played, chances were that I could do better. After employing all my mind tricks, I regained a positive attitude. By the end of the game, I was very pleased with how everything had turned out. In conclusion, the more one practices, the better one gets. Also, keep trying. You never know when things might take a turn for the better. This may seem like a happy ending, but it leaves me with one fear: Will I always need to play nine holes before I can do well? That sounds exhausting! -Birdie