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Well thr first week of the Westshore Men’s Golf League has come and gone.
This week we played the back nine of the the Sweetbriar golf course. Except for the greens, the course was is better shape than it was all of last year. There was grass growing in the fairways and rough and you could actually distinguish between the two. This might not sound like a big deal to some, but if you have played the Sweetbriar course within the last few years, you can understand my excitement!
The greens were just aerated so putting was quite the adventure. It seemed like no matter how hard I hit a putt, it always came up a foot or tow short. We do have to prepay for our league rounds but that does not kick in until May 3 so we had to pay this week. The charge was the normal $16 but they gave us a cart for free. With the conditions of the greens, I still thought that was a pretty steep price.
Hopefully they will put the time and effort into keeping this course enjoyable as opposed to past years when they ignored the Sweetbriar course and put all of their resources in the Legacy course. All in all, I really can’t complain about the condition of the course seeing it is only April 12th.
I subscribe to Golf Magazine and there is an interesting article in the current issue. A golfer in Portland, Oregon, Dan McLaughlin is attempting to go from an average amateur golfer to a pro by dedicating 10,000 to practicing the game. If you figure 8 hours a day for 5 days a week, that comes out to less than 5 years to go from a hacker to a pro. This whole concept is something that Dr. K. Anders Ericsson wrote about, and before even hearing about this theory, I thought about it quite often and not necessarily regarding golf.
I never did studies or had a specific number of hours in mind but Back when Shaquile O’Neil was in his prime and dominating the NBA, except from the free throw line, I often asked why doesn’t he just spend the entire practice shooting free throws? It is not like he needed to work on his jump shot or any defense. Just shoot hundreds of free throws every day and even during the off season. If he did that, it would be hard for me to imagine he would not be one of the best free throw shooters in the league.
He expects to finish his 10,000 hours in October of 2016. I am looking forward to continually checking out his progress at The Dan Plan.
Although we have had a relatively mild and dry spring thus far, it has been a little tough to find a day to go out and play golf…So luckily we only 3 more days until the start of the Westshore Mens Golf League!! We play on Thursday evenings at Sweetbriar Golf Course in Avon Lake, Ohio.
The league is split into (2) nine week halves. The top eight from each half play in a match play formatted playoff. The final two from each playoff then play for the championship at our end of season outing. With 16 different spots available, everyone has a shot at the playoffs, as long as you show up each week. I will get more into the specifics on how the league is run throughout the season.
Our group of 16 guys just got back from our annual golf trip to Santee, SC. This year we modified the package a little to make better use of the weekend and time change. We checked into the Best Western Plus in Santee on Saturday March 10th. We golfed on the 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th. We also checked out on the 14th and started the 10-11 hour journey home after playing 18 holes. The total cost of the package was $425.40 per person. This included 7 rounds (2 rounds per day for the first 3 days and 18 holes on the fourth day) of golf and hotel.
Hotel
This is the third consecutive year that we have stayed at the Best Western and we love it. For starters, they book the whole trip for us including the golf. It has a great continental breakfast including eggs, sausage, sausage gravy, grits, waffles, and an assortment of pastries and fruits. Another selling point for the hotel is that it is walking distance to Lake Marion Golf Course. When I say walking distance, I mean like 100 yards from our room to the club house! The hotel staff if very accommodating to us as well. All in all, I highly recommend booking your golf package through them!
Courses
There are 3 courses that are with 2 miles of the hotel, but since we are playing 4 days, we are always looking for somewhere different to play. This year we tried The Links at Lakewood. We had a 9:00am tee time and when we pulled in the parking lot there was two other cars there. At that moment we knew we made a mistake. Since this is the first time many of us have been out this year, we decided to bump the ball no matter your lie. This rule actually did not matter since there was no where to bump you ball to get a better lie. To say the course was in terrible shape is an understatement! To be fair, the condition of the course was, albeit a big one, the only problem. It was a great layout with some challenging hole and the staff was very courteous.
The second day (Monday) we played Lake Marion Golf Course. This is the course that was a mere football field from the hotel. We play this course and the next two every year so we know what to expect. The course is always in great shape for the middle of March (green fairways and green but the rough is still dormant). Lake Marion also has a very well stocked pro shop with very reasonable prices. A nice feature of this course is that all of the carts have an on-board gps system. This is not as big of a deal now since every smart phone can download a reasonable priced and easy to use gps app called Sky Droid but it is still a nice amenity!
The third and fourth days were about the same, great courses in great condition. On Tuesday we played Santee National Golf Club, my favorite course, and on Wednesday before hitting the road, we played Santee Cooper Country Club. As one would expect, since it is a Country Club, Santee Cooper is the nicest manicured course we play on this trip. It is always in great condition. The one downfall of this course is that it could get a little slow. There are a lot of members and they enjoy playing golf!
Just like in years past, everyone on the trip enjoyed themselves and we are looking forward to our return trip next year!
This past weekend, I visited the North Ridge Racquet Club & Indoor Golf Center as a tune up for my upcoming golf vacation. The club is located on Mills Creek Lane, just north of Center Ridge Road in North Ridgeville, Ohio. The building that houses the golf simulators is in the back of the property.
The management at the club is very accommodating. It is a BYOB type of establishment and they provide a refrigerator to keep your beverage of choice, alcoholic or soft, cold while you play. There was a group of guys that ordered pizza and had it delivered there as well.
They have 4 golf simulators with over 30 courses to choose from as well as a driving range simulator. Our foursome decided to play Pebble Beach. Although it was nice to swing a club, you can’t really rely on the simulator to give you any usable feedback. In our foursome we had players with a handicap of 7, 12, 15, and 20. Two of the 4 guys shot under 40. While this feat isn’t uncommon on one of our league night at Sweetbriar Golf Course, I am quite sure it will never happen with this foursome at Pebble! Don’t get me wrong, this is not a knock on this particular club, it is on simulators in general.
We had just under an hour and a half to play due to prior commitments and in that time we finished 10 holes. This was with shooting the breeze while playing so we were by no means hustling. I would imagine 4 guys can play 18 holes in two or two and a half hours. The charge is $30 per hour for the simulator and they will split up the total among your group so we ended up paying $11.25 each.
This is probably not something I would do when it is warmer and golfable out but since we haven’t been able to get out and play, even with the mild winter we have had, it was a nice warm-up for, as some in our group call it, Golf Boot Camp. So if you have cabin fever and have the itch to swing a club, I would recommend heading over to the North Ridge Racquet Club & Indoor Golf Center to take a few swings and put your hunger to play at bay for a little while.
This is an updated to my previous review of the Sky Droid app for Smart Phones.
Today I decided to try the Course Mapper feature on Sky Droids website to map The Links at Lakewood, the one course that is not available for my upcoming golf trip to Santee, SC. When you start the Course Mapper, it asks you for the name of the course, the address, and the telephone number, all of which are listed when you download the course. Once you enter the information, the satellite map zooms to the address. From there the mapping is quite simple. There is a list differnt features you can map in addition to the front, center and back of the green. You can also map bunkers, water hazards, target points and trees.
The only tricky thing for me while mapping this course is that I have never been there, so I was unfamiliar with the holes. I was able to navigate my way around easy enough by following the cart paths and looking at the pictures of the holes on the score card. I have never mapped a course on Sky Droid and I have never been to the Links at Lakewood, and it only took me about 30-35 minutes to map all 18 holes.
This is just another item in the long list of “Pros” for this app. I definitely recommend ponying up the $1.99 for this great app that will definitely help your golf game!
**Note: I am in no way associated with the publisher of this app and I received no compensation for this or my previous reviews.
The other day I mentioned the USGA Rules of Golf Smart Phone App so today I wanted to post about another Golf App that I use, Sky Droid 1.7.
Any time I spend money on golf it seems worth it. This holds true for the money I spent on the SkyDroid app for my HTC Incredible smart phone. Just doing a quick search on GolfGalaxy.com I found a Golf GPS for $399.99. the Sky Droid app cost me a whopping $1.99. That is not one hundred ninety nine dollars, that is one dollar and ninety nine cents! I figured for that price I had to try it.
Golf Courses
I have had the app for about one and a half golfing seasons and I have yet to play a course that was not available on the Sky Droid. I think that will be changing here in about 11 days as I did a search on search on SkyDroid.net and it doesn’t look like The Links at Lakewood has been mapped yet. After poking around the website, it looks like a very simple process to map a course so I might give it a shot if I have time before we leave for out trip.
Features
The GPS will give you distances to the front, middle, and center of the green. There are also other distances it will give you. There is the distance to the middle of the fairway target, it also gives you distances to the front and back of bunkers and hazards. You can also bring up an aerial view of the hole from Google Maps. There is also a feature in which you can measure how far your shot went.
The one thing the current version is lacking that other, more expensive GPS systems have, is scoring and stat tracking. Again, after digging around their website, it looks like those features will be available in the next release, version 2.0.
Conclusion
All said and done, I am more than pleased with this app. I will give a rundown of the mapping procedure once I get a chance to give it a try. Sky Droid is definitely worth every penny of the $1.99 I paid for it!
This is just an FYI that the most recent version of the USGA’s The Rules of Golf went into effect on January 1, 2012 and are set to expire on December 31, 2015. The changes in this release are minor but it might be a good idea to make sure you have the latest rule book.
One nice thing I found out is that if you have the mobile app on your smart phone, the update is free! Just for the heck of it I went to the Droid Market on my phone and updated my old app and it updated to the current version. That was $3.99 I did not have to spend!
Here is a link to the 2012-2015 Rules of Golf.
This has been a question I have looked into before but, because of information overload, quit before I had an answer. I finally decided it was time to figure this out for myself. I have pooled a bunch of resources and came up with a spreadsheet to calculate my handicap. I will walk you through the calculation and cite where I found the info. There will also a link on the Downloads page to download the spreadsheet.
Since I will be starting out without a calculated handicap index, I am going to assume the maximum allowed for men. That is 36.4 for 18 holes or 18.2 for 9 holes. Now I need to figure out my course handicap. To get this all I have to do is multiply my index by the slope rating and divide by 113. A course of normal difficulty has a slope rating of 113. For this example I will be using Santee National Golf Club, my favorite course on our upcoming trip to Santee, SC.
- My handicap index is 36.4
- The slope rating is 124
So my course handicap will be 36.4 x 124 / 113 or 40.0 (rounded to the nearest tenth).
Once I have my course handicap I need to look-up what my maximum strokes per hole would be. To do this I would go to section 4-3 of the USGA Handicap Manual. By looking at the chart I see that the maximum number of strokes on any hole is 10. What this means is that if I score over 10 on a hole, I need to adjust my score I am using for my handicap before entering it. This becomes my adjusted gross score. So for example, if I had a 12 on a hole and my gross score ended up being 101, I would need to adjust the 12 to a 10 and now my adjusted gross score is 99. One thing you need to keep in mind is that your total maximum strokes per hole will change as your handicap decreases.
Once you have your adjusted gross score you can calculate your handicap index. I will use the score and course from above to calculate. The formula is (ags-course rating) x 113 / slope rating
- My adjusted gross score is 99
- Slope rating is 124
- Course rating is 69.4
So my index for this round is (99-69.4)*113/124or 27.0 (rounded to the nearest tenth).
Once you have at least five rounds in you can figure your index based on the following chart:
- 5-6 Rounds: Your lowest calculated index
- 7-8 Rounds: Averages of 2 lowest indexes
- 9-10 Rounds: Average of 3 lowest
- 11-12 Rounds: Average of 4 lowest
- 13-14 Rounds: Average of 5 lowest
- 15-16 Rounds: Average of 6 lowest
- 17 Rounds: Average of 7 lowest
- 18 Rounds: Average of 8 lowest
- 19 Rounds: Average of 9 lowest
- 20+ Rounds: Average of the 10 lowest out of last 20
Once you figure out the average, you need to multiply it by 0.96. Once you do that then you remove and digits after the tenth (truncate, not round). So let’s say my average for 7 rounds was 27.6. I then need to multiply that by 0.96 and come up with 26.496. I then truncate that to 26.4 and that is my final index.
Now once you have your final index you can calculate your course index as we did in the first step. It is your index x slope rating / 113.
I will be posting an Excel spreadsheet in the next couple of days.
Today starts our warm up for next month activities. The 64 best golfers in the world are paired against each other in one of the more exciting tournaments of the year, The Accenture Match Play Championship. Field is broken up into 4 “regions” of 16 similar to all of the pools that will be starting here in the next few weeks for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship.
One of the matches I am looking forward to is #3 Bill Haas vs #14 Ryo Ishikawa. Haas is carrying his momentum from last year and won a thrilling playoff last week at the Northern Trust Open. For those that did not see the tournament, Haas sunk a 43 foot birdie putt on the second hole of the sudden death playoff to beat Phil Mickelson and Keegan Bradley. And who could forget the $11.4 million shot he made last year at the Tour Championship?
Ishikawa, on the other hand, has not had much success here in the United States. But if you remember, he did shoot an amazing round of 58 a couple years ago on Japan Golf Tour. He is one of the young up and comers on the tour and always exciting to watch.
A couple of other good match ups are #6 Hunter Mahan vs #11 Zach Johnson, and #5 Brandt Snedeker vs #12 Ratief Goosen.
On top of all of these great match-ups, it is a 5 day tournament with the final four playing 36 holes on Sunday! In the infamous words of Nick Gilbert…”What’s not to like?”
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