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I'm a 21 Handicap and I Started a Golf Blog

Two summers ago I stood on the 1th tee at River Creek, my new home course, and hit a drive so far right it landed on the 10th fairway. A guy over there just stared at me. I waved, like that was totally normal, like I'd meant to do that. Then I walked over, apologized, and somehow made bogey from 150 yards away on a completely different hole than the one I was playing.

That's golf for me. That's been golf for me since I joined River Creek in 2024.

I'm 45 years old. I work in tech. I went to Virginia Tech back in the early 2000s and played maybe a dozen rounds total during those four years. After graduation, golf became something I did on weekends when I wasn't busy with kids - two, maybe three times a year at most. I wasn't bad at those outings because nobody there was good. We were all just drinking beer and trying not to hurt anyone.

For twenty years, that was my relationship with golf. Occasional. Forgettable. Fine.

Then my kids got older. My daughter started driving herself places. My son got busy with his own stuff on weekends. And I found myself standing in my kitchen on a Saturday morning with nothing to do. My wife was working on a project. The house was quiet. I didn't know what to do with myself.

One of my of college buddies joined a club and invited me out to play. "You'd love it," he kept saying. "Great way to get outside, and meet people." I didn't really believe him, but I also didn't have a better idea. So I toured River Creek, wrote a check that made me slightly nauseous, and became a member.

The first few months were rough. I'm talking 110, 115, once a 124 that I don't like to discuss. I sliced everything. My drives started left and ended up so far right I was apologizing to strangers on adjacent holes. My irons were worse - I'd chunk the ground behind the ball and watch it dribble forward 30 yards while a divot the size of a dinner plate flew past it. I cursed. A lot. More than I should have. I'd come home frustrated and my wife would look at me like I was insane.

"You were gone for six hours," she'd say. She thought I was out there drinking and screwing around. She figured I must be good at it by now, given how often I went and how long I stayed. She couldn't understand why someone would spend that much time on something and still be terrible at it.

I couldn't really explain it either. But I kept going back.

Sometime around September, things started to click. Not in a dramatic way - I didn't suddenly become good. But I stopped being completely lost. I broke 100 for the first time, then did it again, then strung together a few rounds in the mid-90s. Next year, I bought an Arccos system to track my stats because I wanted proof that I was actually improving and not just imagining it. The data was humbling. My handicap sat at 22. My average score was 98. I hit maybe 40% of fairways on a good day.

But I also shot a 92 once. A real 92, no mulligans, no generous gimmies. I still remember the last putt - a four-footer for bogey on 18 that I was absolutely certain I'd miss. When it dropped, I felt like I'd won something.

That's when I started looking for golf content for people like me. Not the YouTube videos where some pro explains how to shape a draw around a dogleg - I can't shape anything, I'm just trying to make contact. Not the podcasts where scratch golfers discuss their wedge gapping. I wanted to hear from someone shooting 95, 100, trying to figure out why their driver hates them.

I couldn't find much. Most golf content assumes you're already decent. The tips assume you have a swing worth fixing. The strategy assumes you're hitting greens.

I'm not hitting greens. I'm hitting whatever's near the green. Sometimes I'm hitting the green on the hole next to mine.

So I'm writing this instead. Not because I have answers - I definitely don't. But because I figure there are other people out there like me. People who came to golf late, or came back to it after years away, and are trying to get better without any idea what they're doing. People whose spouses think they must be good by now. People who curse too much and three-putt from ten feet and still can't wait to play again.

My goal is simple: break 90. Not once as a fluke, but regularly. Shoot in the 80s and know I earned it.

I have no idea if I'll get there. But I'm going to write about trying.