With the fall sports season coming to a close, I decided that this issue I wanted to try a sport that few people talk about on campus: golf. 

This time I met up with Samantha Song (12) at The Heights Golf Club. She’s been playing golf since either grade and hopes to continue playing after high school, so I trusted her to pick out a good skill for me to learn. We walked to the golf range together, and I started thinking about all my previous experiences in golf (a few mini-golf sessions). If this was going to be a similar experience, I would have it easy this time. However, as usual, it was nowhere near as simple as I assumed.

Before starting, Song told me that she was going to teach me chipping, a skill that is typically taught when first learning how to golf. The chip shot is used in a short distance–typically near the green–where the ball is lobbed into the air for a short amount of time to get it closer to the hole. 

“Once you learn chipping, you can learn all the other skills in golf,” Song said. 

She then showed me all the different golf clubs that she uses and when they are typically used. There were so many that I wouldn’t be able to tell you the difference between them if I tried now. But for this skill, she told me I was going to use the sand wedge. 

When Song demonstrated the skill, I thought there was no way it would take that much to make the ball do a little hop into the air. She started off by teaching me how to properly hold the golf club, and this in itself was much more complicated than how I usually hold the club while mini-golfing. My hands felt so awkwardly positioned that throughout the lesson she kept correcting my grip and reminding me that I needed to keep my wrists as stiff as a rock. By the end of our lesson, my fingers felt tense. With the unnatural feeling of the club in my hand, I attempted to swing. As I brought the club down,  it came into more contact with the grass than anything else. I started to get flashbacks to trying to kick a field goal. However, with a few more practice swings without trying to hit the ball, I started to feel more comfortable with the movement. Then Song decided that I was ready to try actually hitting the ball. When I swung the club, the ball actually went into the air, granted it was nowhere near the hole, but what mattered to me was that it actually had air time. I couldn’t begin to explain the sheer exhilaration and confidence boost I got in that moment. With a few more attempts, some better than others, I was able to get the ball in the air a few more times and once near the actual hole.  

Usually, when I go out to learn these skills, I spend less than 20 minutes with the player, but this time we spent almost an hour for me to progress as far as I did, and I didn’t even realize that much time had passed then. I will admit that it was worth it to be able to improve as much as I did in that time. I think it’s safe to say that this skill definitely took a lot of technique that you need to learn, but it also was surprisingly the skill I had the most fun learning so far. With how close I got to getting a hole-in-one, I probably could’ve spent another hour trying.