The State of My Game - May '12

A quick recap on my golf game.  Until last year I'd always been between a 14 and 16 GHIN index.  I played high school golf and was middle of the pack on a very average team.  I quit golf for about 6 years starting in college but rediscovered my love for it in '92.  I have always had a very smooth swing with good tempo and was never a sprayer of the ball.  What was holding me back from being better was simply not playing enough and a swing that was very upright.  When my teenage son started playing golf in the summer of '10 and my teenage daughter started playing last spring, my course time went way up.  We frequently walk 9 holes in the evening at the course that we live on.  With this increase in play and a swing change I'll cover some other time, my game became more consistent and my index moved lower.  My goal then became to achieve a single digit handicap index.  By summer and fall of last year I was routinely shooting 80 to 85 on my home course. I finally broke the 80 barrier on a legitimate length course with a 77 in September. I reached my goal of a single digit index on 11/15/12 when I reached 9.9. 

All sounds great doesn't it?  I only held that single digit for 2 weeks.  In late November an occasional shank started showing up in my swing.  I played occasionally over the winter but the scores were so bad that I didn't record many of them on my index considering them "practice" scores while I worked the shanks out.  After signing up for the Mesquite Amateur in February I started playing frequently again and recording all of my scores.  My index climbed up to a 12.6 as my very good scores from the fall "fell" off my handicap and I worked through residual shank issues.  Here is a chart from GHIN that shows my index history for the last 6 months. 

I've played a lot of golf the last 2 months as I prepare for the Mesquite trip and I seem to have finally turned a corner. I expect my index to drop again with the revision that will come out tomorrow, maybe to a 10.5 or so which I'll be happy with going to the Mesquite Am.  Here are my most recent 20 scores that will count toward my May 15th index revision.

In my next post I'll cover my current strengths and weaknesses and the preparation plan for Mesquite that I've been working on these last two months.