Disc Golf’s Mental Struggle
You’re out with your crew, maybe your best friend or a family member playing casual rounds to get that practice in before your tournament coming up this weekend. You’re hitting every line giving yourself a look for a birdie on just about every hole and draining those circle edge putts like its your job. Your confidence is booming! Just play like this come Saturday and no doubt you’ll make lead card. You’re ready.
Now it’s Saturday morning and you’ve had your cup of coffee and checked your bag numerous times to make sure you have everything you need for tournament day. The players meeting is taking way too long as you anxiously await tee time. The goal is to win, but you tell yourself just try to have fun.
The 2 minute warning has been called and you and your card mates all grab your go to disc for the hole you’re on and wish each other a good round. You feel the butterflies in your belly and take a deep breath as you approach the tee pad. It’s a hole that you birdie 75% of the time, never getting worse than par. Easy.
You’ve gone through your routine, visualized your line, and go to release the disc only to turn it over and throw it in the water that you’ve never thrown into in any practice rounds! What the hell just happened?! If this is you, you’re not alone.
This is a common story amongst most competitive disc golfers. It’s still something I struggle with more than anything. Tournaments seem to just fester shots that you’ve never thrown before in casual rounds. All of a sudden you’re throwing an upshot to save par from a place you’ve never had to throw a shot from. The bogeys add up so quick and just eliminate any birdies you manage to scrape up.
This is the biggest difference between an amateur player and a professional. This is what I need to conquer to get to the next level of my game. The mindset that I want to try to adopt that I learned from a local pro named Brian is “don’t think about it, just do it.” At this point in time I think the best representative of this is on the Pro Tour is Andrew Fish. Check out any of his Lost Valley Open coverage from GateKeeper Media or round 2 coverage of the MVP Open by JomezPro. He spends very little time thinking about his putt and drains a majority of them.
Now it’s really not that simple. In order to “just do it” you need to make sure you have a lot of repetition under your belt as well. This takes practice and serious dedication with an understanding of the balance between how much thinking and how much doing you do. The road to being professional is long and sometimes I feel defeated, especially when my friends that play way less than me beat me in a tournament! The best thing to do in these situations is use that defeat as motivation to keep moving forward and work harder. That is the key to success!
Make sure you check out my 5 Aha Disc Golf Tips to see what goes through my mind when stepping up to a shot! I’d love to hear from some readers about their mental game or tips you have for getting out of your head so be sure to leave a comment below or on any of my social media accounts!
