Ooooooooo weeeeeee.
Welcome back to my blog. I haven’t written anything in a few months as I decided to let the winter season take some shape, allow time for reflection and now that that new year is here I thought I would document my plans for 2026.
From October 2025 until now I have been working away making plans and having a look back over my goals from last year. Looking at the good, the bad, and the ugly. In order to do this I have had to be really honest with myself, which as we all know isn’t the easiest thing in the world. However, if you can be honest with yourself you can make better plans. I don’t view any goal that I didn’t reach as a failure, I see it as two things (1) an opportunity to grow (2) and a learning curve, and boy did I learn some stuff! Remember, we never fail, we only learn.
So let’s rewind just a little…well 12 months in fact. At this time last year I made the decision to go get coaching. What i found was 2 professionals in Callum Beveridge (Golf Coach) and Paul Moultrie (Mind Body Golf)
For the first 4 months of last year January – April, I was enthused, excited and accountable.
I felt great with everything that the guys were telling me. The swing mechanics and coaching from Callum, and the Mental Coaching side of the game from Paul Moultrie at Mind Body Golf.
I created a planner and stuck to it for those first 4 months, probably 6 months if im being honest (dont want to completely do myself a disservice)
No matter how good you get,you can always get better — and that’s the exciting part.
A point of reflection, and a time to reset
Exercise days, Range sessions, consistent coaching sessions, on course planning and practice and some very good competition rounds (equalled my best score at Auchenharvie of 71 scratch which is only 5 over par) Even got my index to a career low of 10.7 at one point. I was within touching distance of the single figure 9.9 or lower…so close man.
So all of my plans were working and I could see and feel improvement on and off the course.
Something changed, something took the wind right out of my sails. I will get to the thing that changed in a second, but this decision along with many more tiny wee things throughout the course of the season really turned my head, and changed my outlook and perspective about my golf and where I play it.
All of the changes and improvements I made were with one goal in mind. Contesting for the club championship. The way the Auchenharvie88 Golf Club qualifying process works is this: 4 qualifying rounds spread over 6 weeks.Your 2 best nett scores are added together and the top 15 along with the club champion from the previous year make up the final 16. All good.
However, I landed on the exact same score as another member. I shot 86 and 82, he shot 82 and 86. Now remember that order, as it will become important. So we qualified in 15th and 16th spot. 16th spot in qualifying is technically out of the comp (remember top 15, plus club champ from previous season)
So the committee had a decision to make. Which player goes through to the club championship. Now, here’s where it really pissed me off. In my humble opinion, knowing what I know about competition administration and having served 6yrs on the committee, as Match Secretary, Vice Captain and Club Captain I would have asked both players (if agreeable) to play a play-off match, as both players had the exact same qualifying total.
The decision the committee made still baffles me now, and we are nearly 12 months down the line. The committee’s decision: The player who shot the lowest score first should qualify!
My biggest issue with this is that Player 1 and Player 2 shot their lowest score of 82 weeks apart, under different weather conditions, different fields, different course conditions. I felt that this was a completely unfair way of making the decision. Now some may agree with me here, and I’m sure some won’t, but the decision didn’t sit well with me. And to be fair, I’ve been on the wrong side of decisions previously and have totally accepted them, but i just couldn’t get my head around the fact that they have 2 players on the very same scores of 82 and 86 and came to that conclusion.
There is another tiny wee thing that really makes this all hard to swallow. The player that got put into the knockout stages asked his opponent “Who did Bryan get drawn against in his tie?” to which his opponent answered “Bryan didn’t qualify, you were both on the same score in positions 15 and 16, so he didn’t make it” and he then explained the committee’s decision to the player who just pipped me. His response “Someone should have said, i would have played a playoff, or even just given Bryan the tie…im not really fussed about playing in this”
Fuck My Life!
This was where my inner monkey pretty much said “Fuck this…if i cant qualify for that comp what’s the fucking point” and it deflated me. I looked back over the previous months of effort and felt it was all for nothing. My golf suffered as I just stopped doing all the good stuff I was doing.
Now I didn’t realise it at the time. I only just realised that this is what happened when I had a conversation with Paul Moultrie in December 2025, although I didn’t verbalise the exact point to Paul, I knew, I just knew. It was like an epiphany.
Imagine doing all this work to make you mentally strong on the course and an off course decision wrecks every piece of momentum you built. And then to think that the decision shouldn’t have even registered, and then to realise the second half of the season was totally wasted where massive progress could have been made. So now I’m not looking at this as a failure, I’m using it as an opportunity to grow and a learning curve, like I mentioned at the start of this blog.
I won’t make the same mistake again. This season im changing my Golf mission statement from “I play with freedom, I visualise every shot, I focus on positive on-course action , I have a positive pre-round routine” to “I am on a relentless pursuit of my goal, whatever it takes”
Time to treble down?
Although I will retain everything from my very first golfer mission statement I wrote, I feel like I need to not just double down this year, perhaps treble down?
So something else happened, and this is quite a big one as well.
I joined another Golf Club.
Having only been a member of 1 golf club for the last 13yrs since I took up the game and having said at various points in the past that “I would never leave” a few things turned that statement on its head.
First of all, the course/club where I played, Auchenharvie 88 Golf Club…I absolutely loved it. From day 1.
I feel like Im leaving my spiritual golf home
I got on great with everyone, made friends for life, became better at golf, eventually became the Captain of the club, saw the club through some challenging periods, namely COVID and 3 different iterations of golf club management software which I installed. I achieved the status of Ayrshire Golf Presidents Putter (4-man team) winner twice and the big one for our club was winning the Ayrshire Golf Handicap League (6-man Team) in 2022, the very same year we won a historic Ayrshire Treble, a feat which may never be repeated by any club in Ayrshire.
It gave me an enormous sense of achievement and pride, and finals day back in 2022 where we took a bus load of people to Prestwick St Cuthberts for the final, won all 3 finals and then partied back at my house into the early hours of the morning will forever be one of my favourite ever life memories, never mind a golf memory.
I decided to join Largs Golf Club, often referred to by many as “Ayrshire’s Augusta”
It’s a great course, well maintained, tricky, and immense greens.
Quite a few of the friends I made at Auchenharvie left some years ago to join Largs, which was great as they would often sign me on. So it’s not as if I don’t know the course and what I’m getting into, and I get to play more golf with my best mates again.
January is typically a quiet month for golf in this neck of the woods due to the weather. I have played a few winter rounds at Largs and I’m making my plans in every round I play. Plotting around this course is where I feel I will score my best. I’m never going to overpower it, I’m never going to overpower any golf course for that matter, but what I do know is that I can score well on any course.
We conquered all of Ayrshire
At this point our tiny wee club in the North of Ayrshire was being noticed by everyone around Ayrshire. Our club membership rose to the highest it had been in 10 years. I put a lot of effort into making the club as good as it could be.
It hasn’t been a 1 way street though. I have met some really good guys as a result of my membership. Guys that I would consider really good friends now. Golf gave me a purpose and helped with some mental health battles I’ve had over the years, it gave me back the competitive nature that I had when I was younger and the laughs we have had over the years have been phenomenal.
I know that if it doesnt work out where im going next i will always have a home with Auchenharvie 88. I want to try something different for a wee while. So at the end of september the wheels were set in motion.
