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Are you a competitive golfer? Read more on the subject below:
To play competitive golf for a long time is to fail repeatedly, spectacularly and humiliatingly. No one is spared from embarrassment. Even Scottie Scheffler misses the odd three-footer.
Heck, Rory McIlroy missed two of them in the space of three holes to lose the 2024 U.S. Open. But then look what he did in the 2025 Masters...and the 2026 Masters.
RELATED: Watch the new season of Ask Rory, based on his back-to-back Masters wins
Spoiler alert: I am no Rory McIlroy. We play very, very different versions of the same game. He plays upwards of 75 competitive rounds of golf in a given calendar year. I'm lucky if I get in 10. Oh, and he would wax me if he gave me five shots a side.
On that cheerful note...I love tournament golf. Even when it doesn't go well, it's a culmination of the hours and years I've whiled away on driving ranges and practice greens, trying to learn how to turn three shots into two. When things click in the heat of competition, the validation is gratifying. And in the rare (for me) times of victory, the propulsive, absurd top-of-the-world feeling is something that demands to be chased again. Even the failures end up as good stories, once the rage wears off.
With two young daughters, I've had to get picky about my competitive golf. So I'm trying to peak for one single round in 2026. Thanks mostly to poor planning, it will take me some 2,000 away from home: August 26th at Boulder Creek Golf Club (the Desert Hawk and Coyote Run nines) outside of Las Vegas for an 18-hole qualifier for the 2026 United State Mid Amateur, one of the most prestigious golf tournaments a golf schlub like me can aspire to play in.
It will not be easy. Qualifiers like these usually take only the top three to five finishers from a field of up to 100 golfers or more. Boulder Creek hasn't hosted a Mid Am qualifier lately, but recent Nevada qualifier scores have been low. It feels like I may need to put up a 67 or 68 to get through.
Yikes.
This year's U.S. Mid Am (open to amateurs aged 25 and above) has been circled on my calendar ever since the United States Golf Association announced it would be held at the Lido at Sand Valley Golf Resort in Wisconsin, one of my favorite golf courses in one of my favorite places. I played Lido in May of 2024, not long after it opened, and consider it one of the 10 best golf courses I have played (out of more than 700 surveyed in my life so far). Tom Doak and a team of architects, shapers and historians managed to re-create a world-famous course that existed for barely two decades in New York, airlifting every contour to central Wisconsin in one of the most ambitious and compelling golf projects ever undertaken.
Even with the odds stacked against me, why wouldn't I jump at the chance to play competitive golf at one of my favorite golf courses?
The state of my game - and what I plan to do about it
To name three reasons: my ball-striking, my short game and my mind. As of this writing, I am 24 rounds into the second-worst year of my recent golf life. I have tracked basic golf statistics for every 18-hole round since 2016 and folks, the numbers are looking grim so far. My average score (74.96) and score to par (3.42) are more than two full strokes higher than they were in my best statistical year, 2023, when I was able to juice my GHIN to +3.0 for the first and only time. My current handicap index of +0.2 is higher than I can remember it in recent memory. We are decidedly not trending.
Two recent under-par rounds - my first in two and a half months - have pulled me out of complete despair, but the flaws are evident in the numbers. Using my personal-bests as benchmarks, I am not hitting enough greens in regulation, hitting too many putts when I do get the flatstick in my hand and making a pathetic number of birdies.
The diagnosis
1. Inconsistency. I have never been a long hitter among my peer group, but I have always punched above my weight with my irons and wedges. If I had an 8 iron or less in hand, you couldn't hide a hole location from me...until recently. Golfers tend to get restless, and I have vacillated between various feels and swing thoughts seemingly from round to round this year. That ends now.
2. Indifference. I have always described my putting as "streaky at best" but it's been downright stinky in 2026. It's gotten to the point where I am considering the unthinkable: finally regripping my trusty Evnroll ER5 for the first time since I bought it in 2018. The grip is disgusting, frankly, and it's slightly askew, and I'm sure it's forcing me to make certain compromises in my stroke. Oh, and I also need to learn how to hit putts the proper speed for the first time in more than 30 years of playing the game. It's time to get serious on the greens.
The prescription
As a father of two who is fortunate enough to play a certain amount of golf, I still need to be extremely efficient with the precious hours I spend at the golf course. One-on-one lessons are not in the cards for me at the current moment. How can I guide my own improvement?
Luckily, I work for a company that has produced some of the very best golf instruction videos available on the internet. With this self-diagnosis done, I am going to comb the GolfPass archives for videos and series that should help me. I have two natural starting points:
Breaking Par - GolfPass has produced two full slates of our "Breaking..." series that are set up to help ambitious golfers hit new scoring milestones. We have two Breaking 100 series for those just getting started, and we also have shot two Breaking Par series over the years - one hosted by Cameron McCormick and the other courtesy of The Golf Fix host Devan Bonebrake.
Build a Better Game: Putting - Our Build a Better Game... series approach golf game improvement from a skill-by-skill angle, which is incredibly helpful for golfers targeting one particular aspect of their game. This in-depth series, hosted by Martin Hall and his wife Lisa, a former Solheim Cup player, should have plenty of nuggets I can digest as I look to make some incremental gains on the greens, especially when it comes to lag putting.
Play
I also know that I'll need some sort of competitive reps before the qualifier. There is a Sunday game at a local course that I'll try to play in when possible, and maybe I'll pick up one or two other tournament rounds along the way this summer.
I know from experience that excessive expectations in golf can create insurmountable pressure. So even as I embark upon this three-month challenge to get my game in championship form, I am determined to enjoy every triumph and every failure, and I'll check in periodically as the big day of the qualifier draws near, and I'll follow up with a debrief, no matter how well or poorly it goes.
My road to the 2026 U.S. Mid Amateur starts now. Wish me luck; I'm going to need it.
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