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A strategy that helps prevent me from choking again during a match is to apply mental practice to my game. Since I know what my perfect shot feels like and looks like I simply close my eyes for a few seconds and picture myself swinging nice and easy and placing the ball where I want it to go. That way, when I stand over the ball to hit it, I do not have to think about what I have to do to hit the ball. Mental imagery helps me control my procedural memory so I do not switch to a declarative control. Interesting enough, there are no one theory that can explain why mental practice in the form of imagery is effective. However, there are a few excepted hypotheses, involving brain activity and cognition, that propose why mental practice benefits learning and performance. However, some people do not benefit from using imagery as a form of mental practice because they lack imagery ability. For example, my dad loves to picture himself hitting the perfect shot before he steps up to the ball. He was the one who introduced the strategy to me. However, my mom thinks mental imagery is somewhat bogus and does not aid in helping an individual with their shot. Perhaps, she has difficulty imagining an action, which would make her think that mental imagery does ineffective. Not only can mental imagery be helpful in preparing for a well-learned skill but it can also act as an acquisition skill for new strategies. For example, when I first started playing gold I refused to learn how to hit short balls. I only wanted to use my driver and low irons so that I could take a full swing and hit it as far as I could. However, as I got older and wanted to start playing competitively, my dad wanted to teach me how to chip and pitch the ball. Therefore, he told me to watch him take half a swing and land the ball on the green from only thirty yards away. He then told me to close my eyes and picture myself doing the same thing he just did. Imagining this new shot I was about to perform helped me acquire the desired skills I would need to be successful.

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When I was twelve years old I competed in my first competitive golf match. I had practiced with the local golf team and was asked to play in some of their upcoming matches. Considering it was my first match, I performed pretty well and permanently joined the team. I competed with this team for about four years until I considered myself to reach an "expert level." I was the best and oldest player on the team and others looked up to me and expected a lot from my performances. I had led my team to the League Championships where we faced a very skilled team. The match was going well, my team was winning and all I needed to do was score a six on the eighteenth hole par four to win the League Championship. I hit an okay drive that landed in the rough to the right of the fairway. I then hit my second shot out of the rough, into another patch of rough about one hundred yards away. Two feet in front of this rough was water. The water in front of me was only twenty-five yards long at most, a shot I have cleared hundreds of times without even thinking about it. However, in this moment I felt the pressure. I started second guessing my capabilities and instead of relying on my procedural memory, I switched to my declarative memory and I CHOKED. I plopped the ball right into the water five feet in front of me. I could not believe it. After dropping another ball and taking my two stroke penalty, I missed an easy put and scored a seven on the hole, ultimately losing the match for my team. Although I was extremely disappointed in myself, I'm glad it happened because it has taught me to stay calm and simply do what I know I can do in other circumstances where pressure is involved.

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Since I did not personally know Tiger Woods or Phil Mickelson, my dad was the best golfer I knew. I had the best teacher in the game, I was stoked! However, it was not as easy as we both thought it was going to be. Although my dad may not have been a professional, he certainly fit the definition of an expert. He had participated in multiple pre-PGA qualifying events and even though he did not make the Tour, he possessed all the knowledge that the participating golfers had. However, his skills were stored in his procedural memory. Since he was an expert his learned skills had moved from a conscious, declarative control of movements to a nonconscious procedural control. Therefore, my dad had trouble gathering information from his procedural knowledge to explain how to perform certain movements to me. As a novice, I was still very much in the declarative stages of learning and needed someone who could still rehash these steps and teach me. Therefore, I took lessons with professionals that were taught how to dive into their declarative memory and teach young novices.

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Three: A Little BIRDIE Told Me To Do It.

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Three: A Little BIRDIE Told Me To Do It.

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While taking golf lessons, I was always amazed at how well the professionals were able to teach me. Their instructions seemed so simple and made me question why I was not able to do what they were advising me to do prior to the lesson. In the early stages of my career when I first started taking lessons, my golf coach Colin used verbal instructions to convey information. He would first introduce the skill and give me a simple explanation of how I was going to hit the ball.  He left out the small details that most likely would have confused me in the moment and just stuck to the general idea of the skill. After he felt that I was comfortable enough with the general aspects, he slowly introduced smaller details that would improve my swing. For example, when I hit the golf ball it always went right, which meant I was keeping my club face too open. When I was ready for detail oriented instruction, he advised me to tighten my grip, aim slightly to the left, and follow through all the way in order to keep my ball straight. Colin was a great golf coach because he kept his instructions simple and did not bombard me with too much information to think about all at once. He waited until I mastered one important skill before moving onto the next. However, my one complaint about Colin is that he was not very precise with his words. Since he often taught older players, I think he assumed that I would know all the golf terminology that his other players knew. For example, when I first started playing Colin would always tell me to take a large divot when using my irons. However, I had no idea what a divot was until he caught on to my lack of knowledge. Overall, I am so glad that I had Colin as a coach because he was great at what he did and gave verbal instructions very well.

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Golf is hard; there is no doubt about it. Learning how to play golf is difficult and performing well once you learn how to play is arguably even harder. When I first started playing golf, I asked myself after I bad round, "Why am I not learning?" I played poorly and got getting frustrated that my hours of practice did not seem to be paying off. However, I WAS learning. Yes, I definitely had my fair share of bad shots on the course but if I asked a friend who had never played the sport before to go out and play with me, I would look like Tiger Woods out there. Learning is not something that can be observed right away; it takes place over time and is evident through one's actions. Once a skill is learned, there is a relatively permanent effect. Ever hear the saying "Once you learn how to ride a bike, you never forget?" That is because this learned skill is stored in one's procedural memory. No matter how long it has been since a person's last bike ride, they will still remember how to perform the skill. Therefore, my bad round of golf was not because I had not yet learned the sport. I had practiced for years and it was for sure engrained into my procedural memory by now; I simply just had a bad performance. Performance differs from learning as it is temporary and is able to be observed. If I hit a terrible shot on the course, it is evident that I performed poorly. Back to bringing my newbie friend out on the course who has never played before; if they hit a stellar shot, this is due to a lucky one-time performance and not due to learning since they had never practiced before.

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Four: Practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.

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Four: Practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.

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The tricky thing about golf is that it is hard to emulate the conditions that are going to be present in a match during practice. On the course, golfers are challenged with water hazards, fescue, thick grass, sand and various terrains. Therefore, in order to be able to perform well during a game, variability must be considered during practice. As a six year old, I just wanted to go to the driving range with my dad and swing at a million balls with my driver, a practice technique that produces very little variability because of the repetition of the movement. While my dad may of let me do this when I was six and somewhat uninterested in actually learning the ins and outs of golf, he had me practice under conditions that produced a greater variability as I got older. I would now not only practice with my driver but also with my irons, wedges, woods, and putter. I would practice hitting shots out of the bunker, in case I found myself in a sand trap on the course. I would practice hitting chip shots for when I close to the hole but too far to putt. I would practice reading putts so when I got on the course, I knew where to place the ball depending on how much slope there was on the green. Essentially, as a broadened my practice, I increased my variability, allowing myself to increase my capabilities while performing.

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I grew up on a golf course. I would wake up in the morning, roll out of bed, look out of my window and there it was; the vast land that looked as if it extended for hundreds of miles, at least, that is what it looks like when you're a six year old. I would watch the scratch golfers play unbelievable golf, it looked so effortless when they hit the ball. But, I got my sense of realism from the not so good golfers who were just lucky if their ball didn't end up in the water or in the three feet of fescue that swayed in front of them. And then I got tired of watching. I wanted to play. At the age of six I approached my dad, who was a golfer himself, and said, "I want to play golf." He looked at me with a puzzled expression on his face, not because he didn't understand the common classification language that we shared, which allowed him to comprehend that when I said "golf", I meant the various grouped behaviors and movements that were involved in swinging a club, but because I was SIX and I wanted to play GOLF, a sport "made for" a retired male.  Although my dad was reluctant that I would retain any all the skills he taught me, he agreed to try if I was serious about the sport. In fact, I did have a pretty extensive declarative memory about golfing from watching all the golfers outside my window. I just lacked the procedural memory that corresponded with knowing how to control my arms, hands, and torso while hitting the ball.

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I love golf and it has always been my favorite sport since I was six-years-old. However, my parents and I thought that it would be beneficial socially if I also played another sport. Therefore, when I entered middle school I decided that I would join the girl's softball team. However, after playing golf for multiple years, it was difficult for me to grasp how to bat. I held the bat with the wrong grip, I would always swing too low to the ground, and I could never get the timing just right even though other kids who had never played before seemed to be learning quickly. My knowledge of how to hit a golf ball was negatively effecting my learning how to bat, therefore negative transfer was taking place. If I had never played golf before and decided to take up softball then I most likely would have learned at the same pace that all the other kids were learning at. During softball practice, I was experiencing cognitive confusion because I would perform the correct movements but just lower than I needed to because of my golf swing. The swinging of a bat and the swinging on a golf club from the back swing to the follow through, have nearly identical motions, which caused negative transfer to occur.