I went out disc golfing with my buddy the other night. It was one of the few nice evenings we have had in a while. This "heat dome" keeps forming over the middle of the US this past summer and it has led to some pretty hot weather. In fact, today I think the temps are supposed to head back over 100 degrees, so when it was only in the mid 70's on Monday 
I really need to create a HIVE account for my friend so I can reference him properly. Even though he will likely never access the account, you just never know. There might be a day when HIVE accounts are as common as Facebook accounts right?... right?
Anyway, I've been playing disc golf with this friend for the better part of two and a half decades now. My brother in law got me into the sport when I was in my early twenties and then shortly after that I got this friend into the sport.
There was a time when we would play nearly every day during the Summer, and then life got busy like it does and we stopped playing for a while. Fast forward to a couple years ago and this friends son decided to get into the sport.
Turns out he is really really good and started playing a ton. By default, my friend started playing a lot more as well. In turn, him and I started going to the course more as well and in the past two or three years I have played more than I have in probably the previous five years before that.
It's been a ton of fun.
As it happens, this friend has been playing a lot more with his son. I mean, he goes out a couple times a week, so it's no surprise his skill has bypassed mine even though I have technically been playing longer.
There's a lesson in there somewhere....
But I digress. We were out playing the other day and I had a pretty rough round. I had a couple holes where I got triple and quadruple bogeys, but then I also had holes where I got a solid par. My final score was a +13 which isn't the worst I have done on that course, so I was kind of surprised it turned out that well.
It got me thinking about how a couple bad holes can turn a pretty good round into something not so great. I was talking to my friend about it and he mentioned that he had been watching the pros play on Youtube and he noticed that even they shank the disc into the woods sometimes.
He just finished playing an amateur tournament a couple weekends ago and he said the one thing he was really starting to try and focus on is to "not make it worse".
It's no big deal if you go into the woods or throw a disc right into a tree, just try to make your next shot better. If that means laying up, lay up.
That hole I got the +4 on... I threw it off the fairway, then I tried to power it through some thick trees to get it back to the basket. Guess how that worked out for me? If I had just laid up, I would have been far better off.
I often get hung up on the fact that I can't throw as far as other people. The funny thing is, when I try to add all the mechanics in to throw further, I end up throwing way off my lines. Besides the couple of bad holes this past week, the holes I played really well on had to do with me getting back to basics and just doing what I did when I started playing twenty some years ago.
Sometimes finesse matters and you don't always need to send it, and if you do get in the weeds, just try not to make it worse!
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