2022 was a year not unlike the last for me on the golf course. I finished my second full season as a member at Whitmoor Country Club. I won the Club Championship A-Flight for the second straight year. I played in the Metropolitan Amateur Series and made it into the championship event before imploding. All-in-all, it was a good, fun year filled with golf. However, I didn’t get better, and that is frustrating.

Golf is not a game of perfect (as the book by Dr. Bob Rotella lets you know right on the front cover), but it is a game you spend your whole life still trying to improve. You set goals at the beginning of the year and try to meet those goals. In some ways, I had a successful season. My two big competitive goals for 2022 were to win my flight of the Club Championship (I was in A-flight again not Champ flight) and make the Amateur Series Championship. Those weren’t stretch goals. Those were maintaining a status I had reached in my first year of competitive golf.

The truth is though I just peaked at the right time. I was flat-out bad for much of the year. I went through stretches where I didn’t know where the ball was going. Off the tee, it got to the point at certain times where it could have been described as the yips by those not afraid of the word. The Club Championship and the final regular season event were both in the month of September and the courses were in the perfect condition for me to just bump little runner cuts off the tee and get around at just under 80 strokes. That was enough for those events.

I will write a goals blog for 2023 that will go into detail about this dilemma, but my handicap at the end of the 2021 season was 4.4. It got as high as 6.9 in May (and would have been higher without the restriction) and got at as low as 3.4 in July. I ended the season as a 5.1.

Here are my stats for the year compared to last year’s:

Number of Rounds

2022: 144 (94 18 holes, 50 9 holes)

2021: 153 (116 18 holes, 37 9 holes)

Average Score

2022: 80.4

2021: 79

Greens in Regulation

2022: 58.6%

2021: 57.3%

Fairways Hit

2022: 62.2%

2021: 63.6%

Putts per Hole

2022: 1.9

2021: 1.9

Up & Down per round

2022: 1.8

2021: 2.2

Penalties per round

2022: 1.3

2021: 1.2

One of the benefits of doing this is you can see what you need to work on to better set your goals. I already knew some of it because I stay on top of it during the year, but looking at it I can already see where there is major room for improvement.

So here’s to a better 2023 and to not being satisfied with treading water.