Interestingly, the next time you mention having a “last thought” before your swing, it was also a negative, namely, don’t “send it across to the other hazard.” You were already in some trouble, but the result was the pop-up which again cost a couple of strokes.

You and your coach have probably talked this through already, but perhaps seeing it in print may help. You know better than all of us followers the value of visualization and thinking positive thoughts. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have taken the first step of 10,000.

Continued good luck on managing your game, and be sure to check out the best book on the subject, Raymond Floyd’s The Elements of Scoring. Even though it won’t contain many ideas new to you, I’d call it a Must Read. “Play comfortable.”

Tough break, but you also got out of one hazard unscathed which could’ve cost you more strokes. We all tend to think about the near-misses or bad breaks that cost us strokes, but never say “well, I drained a 20 footer which is a really low % shot, so a normalized score is probably one stroke higher”.

Best of luck and keep grinding towards your goals.

you know what might be a fun way to raise some funds that doesn’t involve you doing much of anything extra, while being in line with your goals? Once a month, pick something that you need to work on, like playing a practice round, playing a tournament round, driving from the tees, whatever, and get your twitter followers to chip in rewards for success. Have a running tally of stuff like this on your site, and what the pay-off structure is (rewards for 80% in the fairway, 70% in the fairway, etc.).

It’d be a way for you to get even more practice dealing with pressure and being results-oriented for a particular round, and I know that funding models that allow me to see my contribution as a contribution to a clearly represented whole make it more likely for me to kick in some money. Just imagine that your other backers have put in enough to pay $97 per birdie. Seems to me that makes it more likely that someone will pledge the remaining $3 to get to a round number. And once your community has pledged $100, there’s the challenge of whether we can get to $150.

The other thing this helps with (from the backer side), is that a small donation, looked at on its own, doesn’t feel like it’s gonna make an appreciable difference to you; but if I can think of my small donation as part of a big, communal donation that *does* make a difference (my $3 donation is just one of 200 similar ones), that makes it seem a lot more efficacious, and hence makes it more likely for me to donate.

Anyway, idle thoughts on a Thursday.

(PS: I started thinking about this when I came across the Patreon funding site via the creator of Questionable Content comics: http://www.patreon.com/jephjacques. The site doesn’t seem obviously appropriate to what you’re up to, but the idea of putting together a whole bunch of seemingly insignificant contributions to collectively make a big difference seems *clearly* applicable here.)

I keep learning, that during practice rounds, I need to drop in hazards, and truly learn what my odds of a successful shot from different lies, might be. I just don’t practice those things. My cousin, who does play a good bit of tournament golf has always told me, never try a shot you haven’t practiced when you’re keeping score. Seem’s right, I try things and at best I’m 50/50.

Well done.