If you truly want to test your game and accelerate improvement, I cannot recommend tournament golf enough. Playing in competition exposes every crack in your game, but if you can keep it together and play to your potential in tournaments… then you’ll have a game that can travel.

I played a tournament this past weekend at Dallas Cowboys Golf Club in Grapevine, TX on the US Am Tour. The tour is handicapped and flighted so it’s fun for any skill level and I found myself in the Championship flight competing against 16 players of 3.9 or lower.

If you didn’t know you can follow me (or your friends) live in the Tangent app. Get realtime notifications and leave comments to heckle or encourage. Let’s break it down and see where I finished and how I use Tangent to analyze and improve.

Strokes Gained always tells the story of the day and where I struggled was driving losing almost 4 strokes to my target, which is unusual for me.

Equally unusual for me was gaining strokes on approach against an Elite Am. My practice and drills with Tangent is paying off! I typically lose 4 shots on Approach, so that is 5 shots better than my typical performance.

Diving in, I made too many mistakes with the driver. Mistakes are driving into bunkers, recovery, or worse… penalties, which is exactly what I did on hole 8.

Remember, I can’t use the smart caddie in a tournament and on the dogleg left 8th hole… I talked myself into hitting driver when 3w was the play. A slight block went through the fairway and into the water where I eventually 3 putted for double.

Ouch.

If you’re not using your coachable moments after a golf round with Tangent… you are missing an opportunity. Tangent will walk you through the shots that cost you the most so that you can reflect and figure out how to improve moving forward. In this case… I need to choose a better strategy.

But it’s not all bad! Tangent will also show you your best shots of the round and there was none better than my tee shot on the par 3 17th. A near ace from 180 yards!

Lots of great golf in this round, but the mistakes were big almost all coming from lack of commitment off the tee. I did a round recap that you can view here on Instagram showing even more details from the round.

I finished in 3rd place, just 2 shots back in the event. We were right there. How important was that poor tee shot on #8? Pretty important.

The beauty is, I know what to work on, but I am also seeing progress. My approach game is improving rapidly with the attention it has been getting. I need to work on committing to better decisions. I tried to force driver where it didn’t belong and it cost me.

I’m confident I’ll be winning events in no time with Tangent.

If you want stats like this and want to improve, subscribe and start tracking today.

Play 3 top tier golf courses and The Chain with me and fellow Tangenters.

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