Back to School Edition

It's that time of year again. Back to school! Q School that is. We will catch up with John Deere Classic blog entries during this week but we'll start with the matters at hand.  Welcome to Kannapolis, NC and Golf at Irish Creek. This is a gorgeous layout located just outside of Charlotte. You can read about the Davis Love III redesign of this course here.

Brian and I left Richmond at 5:30AM on Saturday morning. I had just driven in from Iowa Friday night and was on 4 hours of sleep so Brian had driving duties. One stop and just under 9 hours later we arrived. We had no plans to play on Saturday and decided our first view was just walking the course and plotting our strategy for the week.  The view below is my poor man's panoramic view at the green on the drivable #5 looking out over Lake Kannapolis.

Needless to say the views are incredible on pretty much each hole.  From the tips the course is just shy of 7100. You better have your game inline for the course. Scoring opportunities are a little better on the front nine then on the back. The final four holes are stout and will take it a bite out of you if you're not ready for them.

This is a different course then we played last year which was Pinewild CC in Pinehurst, NC. It was time for a change after not advancing from there the last 2 years.

Today was our first practice round. One of Brian's teammates from Ball State, Eric Steger, joined us fresh off his Pre-Qualifier advance a couple weeks earlier. Armed with our notes from yesterday we were one of the first groups off in the brisk 48 degree weather that greeted us. No worries as it warmed up to 80 today here! The picture below was just prior to teeing it up. It was early enough that Brian was the only one on the practice green.

We finished up today with some specific work on short game shots as well as the all important driver and hybrid tee shots. The greens are bent grass but the rough is bermuda and if you're off just a bit of line from the fairway it's a crap shoot on what lie you can get.

Tomorrow's another day of fun work before we tee it up on Tuesday's first round at 10AM off the first tee. Now it's time for some shut eye.

I would be remiss if Brian and I didn't mention the passing of Dan Wheldon out in Las Vegas at the IRL race. Life is so short and his passing was a tragedy and we send out our prayers of comfort and healing to Dan's wife and two children and also to speedy recovery of the other drivers involved in the accident.

Good night everyone and we'll talk more tomorrow.