First of all it’s very important in maintaining a good pace of play. The location of the group behind you is not important. The location of the group ahead of you is. You should be within a shot or two of the group ahead or YOU are playing too slowly.

Secondly, you can’t do anything about the shot you just made. The only shot that’s important is the shot you are about to make. Put the best possible swing on each shot and after that, what happens happens. Move on and look ahead.  As a friend of mine told me, “Pick up your bag and walk to your ball.” That’s all you can do.

Barb Hanson

It happened again. I played a new course that boasted “a tee for every game,” but there was no tee for me. This seems to be happening a lot especially with newer courses. There’s a forward tee somewhere between 4800 and 5000 yards. Then the tees lengthen to 5900 or 6000 yards followed by 6200, 6400, 6600 and maybe a championship tee close to 7000 yards.

I’m a 10-handicap who would like more length than 5000 yards. Something between 5400 and 5700 would be nice. But several times this summer I’ve had to “design my own course” in order to play a course that I find enjoyable.

I feel like the golf course architects are skipping a whole segment of golfers when they set up tees as described above. If men get a choice of 4 or 5 different lengths, shouldn’t women get at least 2 choices?

Some possibilities:

• GPS on your motorized cart. (If you’re a regular reader, you know that I’m a walker. So if yardages are only provided by the GPS system, I’m at a disadvantage. I think that golf courses need to provide yardages for both walkers and riders.)
• Yardage books (usually for purchase in the pro shop)
• 150-yd stake, pole or disk
• Colored disks in the fairway (generally blue = 200, white = 150,  red = 100)
• Yardage indicators on cart paths – a colored line or number
• Disks along the side of the fairway in 25-yd. increments
• Specific yardages on sprinkler heads

These days the hand-held GPS device is becoming more popular. I guess I’m old-fashioned in believing that determining yardage is part of the mental part of the game. I enjoy using the course markings to figure out my yardage.

As important as accurate yardage is, I realize my limitations as an amateur golfer and don’t get hung up on whether the yardage is 135 or 139, I’m not good enough to hone in to that extent. I only need an estimate and then I can take into account some other factors, i.e. pin position, wind, slope of the fairway, etc.

Furthermore for me (and most amateurs) there’s an optimal distance, beyond which I have no club in my bag that’s long enough. I laughed when I saw a sprinkler head that said, “Just hit it!”

Taking all this into account, you should be able to figure your distance quite rapidly and make your club selection. Don’t model the pros on this issue; they often take a lot of time making a club selection, because it really does make a difference to them.