Guess you can only tell yourself “I’ll do it tomorrow” so many times before something gets put off for over a month. Oops. Oh well, guess I’ll do it all in one go right now.
When last I left off, I was preparing to make the trip south for the Yetter. What a great weekend it was. I was able to stop and play a new course on the way down (Page Park in Bristol CT) and then hit another new course on Friday morning when I had a little time to kill (Thompson Park in Jamesburg NJ). Both fun stops that allowed me to tune up a bit without overplaying Tyler, which I’ve done in the past, and wearing myself out.
The Yetter went well, with my usual good start on the East course, a meh round on the West course, then a solid and best to date round on the 27-hole hybrid layout. I played some holes very well and recorded some personal lows on some holes that have given me trouble in the past. I only had two holes that gave me fits all weekend: hole 1 and hole 36. If I simply par those both times I played them, I’d have been easily in the top 10. 12th place isn’t too shabby though, and definitely my best finish at the tournament.
The next couple weeks was swamped with work, not the least of which was the set-up and running of two staples in the Dragan Field calendar…the Greenhorn tournaments. The singles tournament is run in combination with the Trilogy Challenge in order to get a good mix of experienced and novice tournament players as well as excellent players’ packages for everyone. We had 30 players come out for that. Then another 26 came out the following weekend for the doubles tournament.
Following that was another jam packed week catching up on mowing because the mower had been in the shop and getting my game back on track for the Vacationland Open at SMV in Turner ME. Felt like I did a pretty good job on both, but SMV is one of those courses that has a few too many holes that are just out of my reach. So even playing as well as I could, and save for a couple holes toward the end I felt pretty sharp, keeping up with the guys who can outdrive me by as little as 30-40 feet was a difficult task.
In the end, I only finished three throws off where I had hoped to be, but even had I been right on the number each round, I’d have barely made it into the cash. Still a super fun and well run tournament despite the brutally hot/humid conditions.
With a week and a weekend with nothing on the agenda, you’d think I would be able to catch my breath and relax a bit, but no, my nose was right back to the grindstone. I spent the week carving out two new greens and cleaning up a couple others that hadn’t been in use before shifting four pin placements and adding just over 300 feet to the course at Dragan Field. This layout should remain in place through the Thorndike tournament in November, after which the course gets switched over to its winter configuration (which will have a couple new pins/fairways that I still need to create).
This week coming should be a reasonable one (hence the time to write this) in preparing for the Showdown at the Farm next Sunday. It’s been a while since I’ve played a tournament at CR Farm and I’m really looking forward to it.
After that, things start to get crazy again as I have been talked into being the co-TD of the first PDGA Major ever to be hosted in Maine, the US Women’s Championship at Sabattus Disc Golf. As I’m late in joining the staff (the bid was awarded last summer), there has already been a ton of groundwork laid and planning done. For now, my role is to bring my years of TD experience to the event and make sure things go off without a hitch.
The fun never stops on this train.