Season 2023 Overview

Now that the 2023 season is well behind me, I can look at how my game progressed throughout the season and how each tournament went.

A big goal of mine going into the season- in spring- was to revamp my form to gain distance. Who doesn't want to throw farther?? In reality, the first changes I made sapped me of distance and caused me to turn over almost all of my shots. I tried compensating for that by bending over my disc more to force a hyzer angle, but that became unreliable as the weeks went on.

Between events in May, I tried making a few more tweaks to my form, but they all went badly. So I decided to reset and started playing with just a stand-still so that I could focus on my arm movements more. It took me a little while to get used to throwing that way again, and I found that where I lined up to throw the disc wasn't necesessarily where the disc went- my release point was off.

I had a lot of down-time between events in June and I spent that time working on my arm movements, lining my hips up, paying attention to my release point. It was time well spent and when my next event, BFDO, rolled around, I felt ready. All it took was a few bad drives to leave me doubting the stand-still form and revert to bad habits.

Once BFDO was over and I had time to reflect, I realized that all of the form changes were doing more harm than good. I spent several weeks doing field work again to try and "rediscover" the form I had used at the beginning of the season. The rest of the season I tried to tamper my expectations and just focus on other parts of my game. I had some really great rounds, some really poor rounds, and a lot of rounds in-between. Sadly enough, I finished my season with a poorly rated round of disc golf and a tournament played well below my modest expectations.

Thoughts & Feelings

For a while I felt that the hours I spent doing field work each week was wasted. I should have focused on upshots or forehand work or something else.

Luckily, time heals all wounds- or so they say. Life got busy, and I took a step back from disc golf for the late fall and winter months. Looking back, I think I put too many expectations on myself that each small tweak I made would somehow result in my throwing an extra 50-100'. And when it didn't I started forcing shots, tried to overpower my disc, and compensated in other ways which resulted in a lot of bad shots.

I'm proud of how my putting practice the previous winter & spring translated into some really great rounds of disc golf in the spring up until Memorial weekend. Unfortunately, I had so many other things going on that I really neglected to pracitce my putting throughout the summer. That caused me to lose confidence in my putt and make some silly mistakes.

When the season ended and I got my last ratings update of 2023, I can't be disappointed that my rating went up to 857, a personal best.

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