update!
i spent 4 days in monterey last week for the 2020 ncga net amateur championship.
i drove down on saturday so that i could stay over and not have a long drive down - itʼs about four and a half hours drive from tahoe - on sunday morning.
the course is, frankly, breathtaking - visually very beautiful with challenging holes everywhere and extremely fast, hard-to-read greens. here is a panoramic view looking out over the 16th and 9th holes from the clubhouse:
on sunday early afternoon, i had scheduled a practice round at the course as i had never played there before and did not want the first day of the tournament to be my first round ever.
i got hooked up with 3 locals playing their regular sunday match and they were excited to learn that i was playing the tournament the next couple of days. one of them - peter - told me “stick with me and iʼll tell you everything you need to know”.
i am so, so glad i played the practice round as itʼs a long, tough golf course with extremely fast greens and i learned a huge amount on sunday - from peter and the others - that helped me on monday and tuesday.
here is the view standing on the 1st tee - a 489 yard par 5 to start:
on the front 9, there are a lot of trees - almost every hole is a pretty tight corridor of trees so thereʼs not a lot of room for hooks and slices off the tee. thankfully, i did not embarrass myself in front of my practice partners on sunday and hit a great drive right down the middle which is always a good way to start a round.
on monday and tuesday, i also hit great drives and itʼs amazing the amount of inspiration a great 1st tee shot gives me.
hereʼs the view from the 3rd tee:
another tight shot with not much room for error. sadly, on both monday and tuesday, i put my tee shot out of bounds right and limped off the hole with a double-bogey both days.
the front and back nines are visually different on the course - with the back nine being a little more open generally. but still the tee shots are pretty tight - hereʼs the view from 14 tee:
on my practice round sunday, i shot a poor 97 but that round was more about learning than scoring. my handicap is 15.3 and, because poppy hills is a relatively hard course, my course handicap when playing from the tournament tees is a full 18 shots (that means i get a shot - or a ‘popʼ as we call it - on every hole) when playing normally. but, because this was a tournament, we were not getting our full handicap so i got, from memory, 16 shots.
monday was a fun day. the weather was absolutely beautiful and i teed off (on the 10th hole - our group started on the back nine) at 9:09am. the other 3 guys in the group were fun to play with and nobody was taking the round too seriously - which can definitely happen at events like this.
i made use of all i learned on sunday and shot 89 - an 8 shot improvement over my practice round - which i was pretty happy with:
i had a 7 on #1 because i bladed a chip right across the green (probably the bad golf shot i hate above all other bad golf shots). i was also mad at myself for the aforementioned out of bounds on #3 which lead to a double bogey both days. but, not bad considering the course, the conditions and my lack of experience. i finished monday in 8th place in my flight (the tournament was organized into 3 flights based on handicap ranges).
on tuesday i teed off on the front nine with a new group - we were the 2nd last group to start because we were the players in places 5th-8th in the tourney. it was another fun group (one guy in my tuesday group remarked that his monday group had been “
a bunch of stiffs who didnʼt want to talk to anybody").
i had a great start on tuesday, parring the first two holes. then came #3 and you know what happened… i canʼt remember what happened on #7 but it canʼt have been good - i donʼt often card a triple bogey these days:
i had hoped to improve on mondayʼs score on tuesday but i just could not get anything good going and couldnʼt get a break anywhere and ground my way to a 91. that dropped me to 10th place in my flight and 10th place was where i finished:
as ever, it felt like one better putt here, one closer approach there and a couple of luckier bounces and i would have been easily knocking on the door of the top 5, maybe even better.
i really hope i get a chance to play a qualifier or two next year because i think i am definitely at level where i can compete to win one of these. it was a magical 3 days of golf for sure!
alasdair