How to Enter a Golf Tournament
If you really want to test out your golf skills after playing over the past few years, enter a golf tournament. This will add the pressure of competition and other people watching you while you play, which often changes the game of golf entirely, since it is such a mental sport. To enter a golf tournament at the amateur level, you will need to do a couple of things first. As with most things in golf, there is a process you must go through to do anything. Check out the instructions for how to enter a golf tournament below so you can test out your skills against the competition.
Find Tournaments You Can Enter
Golf tournaments, like the sport of golf itself, often try to make themselves relatively exclusive from the general public. Many of these tournaments are at local country clubs where you have to be a member or a guest of a member. Or, these tournaments have outrageous greens fees that will price out most people who aren't already members of high-end country clubs. This all depends on how much money you have, your membership status at country clubs, the number of friends you may have who are country club members and how good you are at golf. If you don't want to spend a lot of money and deal with this exclusivity, look into the public golf course tournaments that will be held a couple of times per year. You'll get a wider variety of competition this way, anyway.
Get Your Handicap
Once you know your handicap, the people who are running the tournament will know what field to put you in. Your handicap is the number of strokes you shoot over par, on average. So a scracth golfer, or those who shoot around par on average, which is very difficult, will be in one bracket. The A Flight golfers, who have handicaps of 75 to 80, will be in another bracket. The B Flight golfers, who have handicaps of 81 to 85, will be in another bracket, and so on. This will allow the competition to be the most fair throughout the tournament and also allow you to win your bracket, rather than having the almost impossible task of competing with semi-pro players.
Know the Other Types of Tournaments
There are a wide variety of golf tournaments that you can enter if going at it alone in your handicap bracket is too much pressure or doesn't seem fun to you. Many golf courses and clubs have things called "best ball tournaments", where you play as a team and take the best ball hit by that team, playing each shot from where the ball lands. This changes the way the game is played, allowing team members to hit bad shots as long as the other team member hits a good shot. It also makes it a team sport and alleviates a lot of the pressure that builds on individual golfers while they are playing in tournaments.
Play and Have Fun
The reason you have entered a golf tournament may be to measure your skills against other golfers out there, but the worst thing you can do is think about that. You played golf so well in the past because you were just enjoying the game and not worrying about anything else. Do that in a tournament and you may just surprise yourself!
