How I Dropped 5.6 Strokes in 2 Years While Working Full Time
The numbers don’t lie (although to be fair, I didn’t record incomplete rounds or rounds which involved practice shots, etc.).
From a scoring average of 81.6 in 2023 to 76.0 in 2025, I dropped 5.6 strokes. Over roughly two years, working a full-time job that regularly demanded 50-plus hours a week, with no sabbaticals, no extended golf vacations, no professional coaching more than once or twice a month, and the occasional week or two with little or no practice.
Here’s what the data says, year by year.
First, the decade of nothing
For about ten years after college, I was a 9-handicap who never got better. I played once a or twice a month when the weather was nice, practiced occasionally, and took one lesson at GOLFTEC (not the best experience, but I’ll save that for another time). Good enough to not embarrass myself, bad enough that real improvement felt like a different person’s problem.
From meeting more individuals like myself, that’s a surprisingly common place to be: you know how to play, your swing is functional, you break 90 most of the time and occasionally flirt with 80. But the scores don’t really improve.
The reason, I eventually figured out, wasn’t talent or available time. It was the complete absence of anything deliberate. I was going through the motions of golf without doing any of the things that actually produce improvement. I guess the same can be said about one’s career, fitness, or anything else worth pursuing.
What the data actually shows
2023: 11 rounds, avg 81.6, range 77 to 89
This was my first year of official tracking and competitive play since I was a teenager. I entered tournaments, worked with a coach, and started working on my weaknesses.
The average of 81.6 looks reasonable on paper. The range tells a different story. My low this year was a 77 while my high was an 89. A 12-shot spread across 11 rounds means I wasn’t a consistent 81-handicapper; I was an unstable golfer who sometimes played like a 5 and sometimes played like a 20. The differentials confirmed it: 4.9 on my best day, 15.1 on my worst.
That 89 is worth dwelling on. It happened in early September, mid-season, on a course I’d played before in a tournament. Not a new track, not a brutal setup. I simply fell apart - penalty strokes from a giant right miss, several three puts, and a slew of other poor shots which can primarily be attributed to an unstable nervous system and poor concentration. I was capable of shooting 77 and instead posting 89 in the same month. That’s not a swing problem. That’s something else entirely.
The year revealed the actual problem: my scoring problem in competition was primarily mental, not mechanical. That was disheartening and clarifying in equal measure.
What improved: I started occasionally seeing a coach who challenged me to primarily slow down my swing and swing more “in to out” to promote a slight draw.
What didn’t: The bad rounds stayed very bad. The gap between my best and worst was unacceptable, and I knew it. While I was working on the “in to out” swing, the big block right would show up randomly – and almost certainly under pressure.
2024: 3 rounds, avg 78.7, range 73 to 82
I need to be upfront about a limitation here: only three rounds on record in 2024. That’s not a large enough sample to draw firm conclusions from the average. I played more golf than that but fewer officially submitted rounds, which means the 78.7 figure is directional at best.
What the three rounds do show is that the floor and ceiling both moved. The high dropped from 89 to 82, a 7-shot improvement in my worst-case round. Seven shots off the blowup. That didn’t happen by accident; it was the first tangible payoff from the mental game work I’d started in late 2023.
The low dropped from 77 to 73, and that 73 mattered. The differential was 2.2, which means on that day I played somewhere close to scratch-level golf. Not a fluke birdie round, but a controlled, consistent round that produced a score a 2-handicap would be satisfied with.
What improved: The worst rounds got significantly better. The big miss became less frequent and less catastrophic. The floor of my game shifted and I started feeling slightly more comfortable (but still uncomfortable) in competitive settings.
What didn’t: The ceiling still had room to move. Three rounds of data.
2025: 14 rounds, avg 76.0, range 72–83
This was the year things started to click.
Fourteen rounds, average of 76.0, low of 72. Two rounds of 72, both in competition. The differentials on those rounds were 0.6 and -1.0, meaning on those days I played to scratch. I won a small local tournament.
The most interesting thing the 2025 data shows isn’t the lows, but rather what happened to the frequency of bad rounds. In 2023, four of eleven rounds (36%) were 83 or worse. In 2025, one of fourteen rounds (7%) was 83 or worse. The blow-ups didn’t disappear, but they became rare.
What improved: Scoring average dropped 2.7 strokes from 2024. Consistency reached a level I hadn’t experienced since high school. The best rounds were legitimately scratch-level performances.
What didn’t: The occasional 83 still shows up. The 10+ differential rounds haven’t been eliminated, just made rare. Putting remained mediocre.
What actually drove my improvement
Tracking every “serious” round. You cannot fix what you aren’t measuring.
Consistent practice, not volume. Two sessions a week when I could, one session every week when things were busy. I also got a putting matt to help not completely lose the short game feel when things were busy with work and my family life.
Competition exposure. Pressure reveals problems that range sessions hide indefinitely. I still have a long way to go here but playing in tournaments made the non-tournament “serious” rounds feel like a breeze.
Taking the mental game seriously. For two years it was the primary limiter and still is. The 7-shot improvement in my worst-case round from 2023 to 2024 was almost entirely attributable to mental game work, not swing changes.
Winter practice. Using a simulator when the weather turned poor (vs. taking weeks / months off during an “off season”) maintained the consistency that kept improvement steady and prevented too much backsliding.
2026
My scoring average currently sits slightly above where it was in 2025. For better or for worse, there isn’t one thing holding me back. I think all facets of my game (driving, iron game, wedging, putting) could all use some serious improvement. My “15th club” (the mental game) also needs to continue improving. I’ll be reflecting on some of my learnings there at some time in the future.
Onwards and upwards!
- CG
