I hadn’t played at Little Mountain in quite a while so my step-dad and I went for a practice round before the tournament. I printed out the yardages that were given online so that I could gain a better understanding of club selection and choose landing areas that would be helpful for my tournament. Feeling really confident about my practice I was excited and less nervous about playing (I hadn’t played a competitive round since October due to COVID-19).
I arrived with over an hour of warmup time to get back into a tournament routine. I started off with a solid par but struggled from there on out in the first round. I had a few good pars and hit some solid shots but unfortunately had no birdies and no one-putts. We were not allowed to remove the flagstick, and I had a two-footer that bounced off of a leaning flagstick. I was surprised to see that the tee boxes that I played from in my practice round were incorrect on almost every hole, so I began to total the yardages. It came to nearly 6100 yards (400 yards off of the tees we should have played at 5703 yards) and the day was extremely windy. I was very disappointed with my score and preparation and knew that the only way to score better was to focus on my putting when I got home. After driving back from Ohio, I went to my home course with my step-dad and worked on hitting putts with correct speed and adjusting my alignment.
On Day 2 my mindset changed a bit. I took a few more risks because I needed to gain lot of strokes to move up the leaderboard. I started off with a birdie on the first hole! I made many more putts to make birdie or even save par a few times and I hit many more greens than I did the first day. I ended up shooting 77 (10 strokes better) even though there was more wind than the first day. I moved from T8 to 5th (one shot out of fourth). Overall, it was good to play competitively and I’m excited for my next tourney.
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