Farewell to Annika

Yesterday was Annika's last day on the LPGA tour for now at least. Even though I have never met her she always carried herself as a strong, compassionate, yet quiet person. She gave so much back to the game of golf and we will truly miss her. She changed the game for the better as did Tiger, when they were not satisfied with a game of just consistency. They both became better players and athletes by incorporating weight training, conditioning, and nutrition into their daily routines. I believe that if Tiger hadn't gotten so strong in the gym that you would not see so many players hitting as far as they do and the game would not have progressed as it has. Golfers have become strong athletes regardless of what the outside world says. In order for professional golfers to perform at their best at all times during a tournament requires a lot of hours not just in the gym, but on the course practicing. As I found out, the hard way, in Florida for the Golf Channel Amateur Tour National Championship what you put into your body makes a difference in your performance. I was not eating enough of the right foods and my game dropped dramatically after the first seven holes. I was on my way to one of my best rounds and because I wasn't eating enough my body was not fully nourished and did not perform. Annika will sadly be missed, but we will always remember how she changed the game of golf and I will not be surprised if we see her in the future.

Men and Women Winter Golf Fashion

Winter is finally here and I am sure a lot of you are wondering what is in fashion this season. I will be putting together some pictures with a few comments on my new website of the big brands Nike and Adidas just so you can see what colors are in fashion for the winter season. I love golf fashion, so I will be taking my time and I will try to give you as much information as possible about the clothes and I will suggest various outfits. If you have any questions or would like to see other manufacturers just let me know. I pretty much have access to almost all of the catalogs for various clothing designer and I love to explore new designers so just e-mail me what you want to see and I am more then happy to do it. With all of that said I will start with the men's winter line from Nike and then I will move onto the woman's collection from Nike and then onto the Men and Woman's Collections from Adidas. Here is my website where you can find pictures from most of my golf adventures, two videos from the Samsung Championship and Paula Creamer's Victory speech, and pictures from the Nike Catalog. My website is and will always be a work in progress, so bare with me.Enjoy!

Winter Golf Fashion

Winter is finally here, which means for most of us, that it is time to bring out the rain gear and fall/winter colors. This week I will post and put together the fall/winter golf fashions for men and women, so stay tuned!

Ken Venturi Golf Clinic

For the past two years ATR International has supported BASHOF (Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame) which is an organization who recognizes Bay Area Athletes as well as supports children who want to play sports. Monday was the BASHOF Golf Classic at the Olympic Club in San Francisco. This event is always something I look forward to because it is so much fun, you meet amazing retired Bay Area athletes, and play golf on an amazing course. Ken Venturi grew up in the Bay Area and we are blessed to have him host a golf clinic, which ATR International has sponsored for the past two years, and I have been fortunate to meet him a few times and sit at his table after the round and talk/take some pictures with him. He is really nice and so approachable.

I invited my coach Kris and my big sis Sandy to come out and play with us. Sandy and Kris are such great golfers I wasn’t sure how I would fare, and how much I would contribute to the group. It was play your own ball format and the two best balls counted. The conditions were not too bad, except that the greens were in pretty bad shape. I think the Olympic Club is trying to convert their greens, so they were not well taken care of and it was hard to now exactly what they would do. Sometimes they were fast and sometimes they were slow, and it didn’t help when you had to put over a big diseased patch. Nonetheless, we had an awesome time and dinner is always a great show. Last year I had the pleasure of sitting next to Gene Upshaw and since he passed away not long ago there was a nice tribute to him before dinner. After the tribute and the nice dinner they gave away the prizes for the day and I ended up winning longest drive for the women on the Ocean course! I won a $100 gift certificate to a restaurant in San Francisco. But, I must say I just edged out my big sis Sandy, and Kris who most certainly would have beaten me and the longest drive for the men, but she ended up in the rough, so it didn’t count. Basically I got lucky. :) After the prizes the auction started, which is really fun. We won our tickets to The Master last year from this event (Ken Venturi Donated them) and my dad was very eager once again to bid on them. This year they added some extra perks to the package, such as special passes to the CBS Lunch Booth, and some time with Jim Nantz of CBS Sports. The bidding was really exciting this year. For whatever reason last year BASHOF had to almost beg people to bid on the tickets for some reason, but this year it was almost a bidding war, which made things really exciting. In the end we got really lucky and my dad ended up winning the tickets. I am one of the luckiest people in the world and I can’t wait to go to The Master with my family again to experience one of sport’s most elite events. I will of course post as much as I can from August as I did last year.

The rest of the night was great fun and I can’t wait to do it again next year. Next up...18 Hole Ladies Halloween Tournament.

Tiger at Torrey Pines

I was really excited to get to play golf again and start from scratch and try to play Andrea golf. We arrived a few hours before our tee time so we could have breakfast at The Lodge at Torrey Pines and just relax and warm-up a bit before the days round. While we were having breakfast I realized that one table was full of people reviewing binders that read Tee off with Tiger. I didn’t think much of it, but at the end of breakfast the waiter told us that Tiger will be on the course filming a commercial for his tournament. Well, it turned out Tiger was meeting a contest winner and he would walk a few holes with the winner and be his caddie. We eventually saw Tiger as we were getting ready to tee off doing an interview for the local news station. It was kind of cool to see Tiger unexpectedly at Torrey Pines.

The rest of the day was really fun, except that we paid $40 for a cart that could only be driven on the cart path! But we managed, and because it was a beautiful day there were a bunch of groups on the course and we were kind of running back and forth between our golf balls and the golf cart in order to not fall behind.

All in all we had a great day of golf, even though I did not play as well as I wanted, and it was awesome to watch the F/A-18 Hornet Navy Fighter Pilots fly over the golf course about every 20 minutes. Those planes are so amazing and as loud as they are it did not drive you crazy. I am a proud supporter of the U.S. Military as my cousin is a Pilot in the Marines. Thank you to all Men and Women who serve and protect this beautiful country.


Tiger watched the F/A 18's fly overhead.

Golf Channel National Championship - Day 4

The last day was more of for fun then anything else. My mom was able to ride in the cart with me which was really nice. The shotgun start was at 8:30, so I got to sleep in a little bit, and I just didn’t worry too much about warming up. I just practiced on the putting green and walked around and talked to people I had played with in the previous days.

When we drove out the the hole I was in group 14A and one of the guys in group 14b told me that the two guys I was playing with were in the championship flight (scratch to 5 handicap), so he was nice enough to invite me to play with his group. We played in a five some and in order to speed up the game we played on points so a double bogey was 0 points, bogey 1 point, par 2 points, birdie 4 points, and an eagle was 6 points. After a bogey we would just pick up. I think by Saturday I was mentally and physically burned out, even though I was so happy to be playing golf. So I just looked at this day as just trying to make some adjustments to my swing. I realized that I was standing a hair to close to my club, which caused my arms to jam at impact and in turn left the club open. Even though I did not win anything I had a great time with my playing group and overall it was a great experience.

I learned that I need to keep practicing the technique of my full swing as well as the technique of my short game, so when I am faced with competitive tournament my game will not come unraveled when I do mentally. I am not sure how you accomplish this other then pounding balls on the range and just playing as much as you can. I realized that when I play on my home course I am just go out to play for fun and I don’t really focus on what I am doing or what I want to accomplish. From now on I am going to have a new approach to playing at my home course and how I practice. I can’t wait for the off season to come. I really want to work on my strength training and fitness. As much as I love going to the driving range and just practicing my short game, I know the work I will do in the gym will improve my game dramatically and I can’t wait to see the results of it on Tour next year. Next up...Torrey Pines in San Diego.

Golf Channel Amateur Tour National Championship - Day 2

Wow 7:43 Tee time! I have never played golf so early. The sun doesn’t rise here until 7:30! I didn’t warm up as much as I wanted because I didn’t have much time, and I thought it was more important to warm up on the practice green. I thought today would be a better day since I did not want to make the same mistakes as yesterday, but I made different mistakes today. I best hole I had was on a par 3 with a Mickey Mouse bunker, and it was a closest to the pin contest and I had beat the person who was already on the green, which was about 6-8 inches from the hole, and I made the birdie put. It felt really good. Especially since I had a par on the hole before. After that I had two more pars, thankfully, because that really saved my score. I still shot a 106, but as good and confident as I feel, I cannot compete to a certain degree with men who can hit the ball at least 250 yards and when I am trying to reach a 545 yard par 5 in regulation. But, I try to do what I can with how my game is.

After the round I went to the TaylorMade Performance Lab, and it was an amazing experience. I will do a separate post on my experience, but even though I see my swing on camera for my lessons it was great to see it a different angles and the lines for my hips, shoulders and feet. You get to take with you a CD of all of your swings from driver, irons, chips shots, and your putting stroke. I took a modified version of it and I just looked at my driver swing, iron swing, and my putting stroke. I will attempt to implement the changes that I discussed with Travis (the The TaylorMade performance lab guy) and Phillip (my Sacramento tour director). Everything that they said were things that I had previously discussed with my coach, so it was easy to make the adjustments. Tomorrow I play at another new course (Orange Lake) and again I have an early tee time. I am definitely going to try and warm up on the range as much as possible to just loosen up my back and get use to the changes I want to make. Wish me luck!