How Often Can You Expect To Play Great?

To this day, one of the best lessons I have ever learned was from my college tennis coach, Dave Morin. He sat our team down one day after a disastrous practice where the majority of our team played poorly. Everyone was frustrated because our expectations for that practice were not met by our performance and the entire mood of the team was off.

In short, Coach Morin told us this:

You will play 10 tennis matches. Out of the 10 you play, six of them will be average. Two of them will be really good, and the other two will be poor. He went on to tell us that on the days you are playing great, everything is in flow. The bad shots aren’t that bad, all aspects of the game are clicking. On the days that are average, one aspect of the game might be off, and the other facets of your game will be what you rely on. On the days that are poor, nothing feels good.

So if you are golfing once per week, you get peak performance once every 5 weeks. The average days will happen three out of the 5 weeks, and the poor days will happen once every 5 weeks.

He went on to discuss what makes a great player. He said, greatness is not about how often a player plays amazing, but it’s how often a player can win his matches when he doesn’t have his best stuff. In golf terms, you need to find a way to maximize the rounds where one or a couple parts of your game are not really good.

There are many lessons to be learned from this article, but for me, this conversation helped reset how I view my golf rounds in terms of my golf swing. I know that most days I will not be great, so instead of getting frustrated when I am having an off day, I dig down deeper mentally and have more acceptance when the bad swings happen. Avoid worrying about what MIGHT happen and do everything in your power from shot to shot to allow you to hit the next shot as good as you can. That is all you can do. If you let the next shot be affected by the previous one, you will not get the most out of your rounds.

Reset your expectations. Enjoy the days where things are great and celebrate them. Know that bad days will happen and that is just how sports work. Lastly, dig down deep on the average days because those are the ones that determine really how good you are.