Returning to Heron Lakes and officially TPI certified

I received some bad news last Friday.  The new Director of Marketing for Columbia Edgewater Country Club informed me that the Board had voted to “hold off until further review” my renewal at Columbia Edgewater.  I knew this day could come, but didn’t expect it to happen so suddenly and now will be returning to my golfing roots at Heron Lakes starting this past weekend.  My membership at CECC is “not dead in the water” as the Director of Marketing told me and there is a good chance that we could see a renewal when the Board next assembles.  I will be doing everything in my power to help insure a positive vote over the next couple weeks and will keep the blog posted with progress as I hear it.  I am extremely grateful for everything that CECC has done for me and my training over the past two years and would love to remain a member as The Dan Plan continues to grow.

At this point, I do not want to write a final Thank You blog post as I hope that this is just a speed bump rather than a final goodbye so will hold off on finalities.  But, if they choose to not renew my membership then I will have a lot to write about as so much of my golfing life (2/3) has taken place there and it will be hard to part ways.  I love CECC and have met countless friends while putting in about 3,000 training hours over the past two years.  More about that to come soon regardless of the decision.  I believe that a final answer will arrive in about two weeks.

Just because my home changes, doesn’t mean that anything else has to.  I will keep grinding away either at Heron Lakes or one of the other great municipal courses around town and be spending at least one day a week with my swing coach, Bruce, down at Langdon Farms.

Heron is a great option with two different courses that offer very different styles of golf.  It’s quite beautiful too.  Here are a couple of shots from the Great Blue course.  It’s rated 73.2 140 from the tips, so definitely a challenge:

I am officially TPI Certified now!

So cool.  The certification test was much harder than I thought and took me about an hour to answer 20 questions.  The test covered everything from diagnosing potential swing faults by watching videos of golfer’s swings to describing what potential swing characteristic someone may have based on physical limitations and how to improve upon those physical aspects.  After reading through the 220+ page manual a couple of times this past week I feel that I have a much firmer understanding of swing mechanics as well as new ways to improve upon my own swing.

I am getting a bit tired of hearing myself talk about golf specific swing stuff so won’t go into too much detail, but the biggest weakness that I see in myself is my right glute muscle not firing enough to post up properly late in the round.  It gets fatigued and I start losing posture while finishing my swing.  Knowing this and how to strengthen the muscle helps me become better at finishing rounds.  There’s nothing worse than playing 14 good holes just to fall apart at the end and the cause of this is usually either mental or physical fatigue (or in a lot of cases a bit too much beer  I’m safe from that syndrome, though, as I don’t drink at all).

If you don’t know the cause you can’t figure out how to fix it.  TPI addresses the physical swing and helps golfers pinpoint specifics to work on.  If you are around Portland I would love to get some practice in and do some free TPI Screenings.  Let me know and we can meet up at Heron or somewhere around town.  I’m new at this so it may take a little while to do one, but if you are willing to work with me we can figure out how to help you improve.

Off to Langdon for my next swing lesson.  It’s just over a month into the change process and I am starting to better understand what it should feel like.  I played 36 at Heron yesterday and shot 80-80 on the two courses.  A lot of the misses were club face at this point, I haven’t been hitting it fat in a couple days; definitely a sign of progress.