The Scratch Dad Project

Weekly review. The house rule is that the week is the unit, not the round — single rounds are noise, and I try not to celebrate or panic off any one of them. So here’s the week.

(New here? I run a virtual coaching staff — six voices, each owning a part of my game: the Architect on swing and mechanics, the Quant on analytics and strokes gained, the Touch on putting and feel, the Surgeon on the short game and wedges, the Professor on the mental game, and the Doc on the body and movement. When an insight is theirs, I credit it.)

The index moved

17.6, down from 18.4 at the start of this project. That framing — that the index is a lagging indicator, moving last, only after the underlying skill has already shifted — is the Quant’s. It’s why we watch the component numbers and treat the index as confirmation rather than the scoreboard. Small move, right direction. I’ll take it.

The win: my worst thing is getting better

My confirmed, season-long leak has been approach play, by a wide margin. This week the strokes-gained trend has it improving, meaningfully, against baseline. That’s the whole ballgame — if the biggest hole in the bag is the one closing, the plan is working.

The fix isn’t glamorous, and I can’t take credit for it. The diagnosis was the Quant’s: I chronically come up short because I calibrate off my best carry instead of my average one, so the instruction is simply to club up. The swing piece is the Architect’s — let the body lead so the face squares instead of flipping through impact. Boring, repeatable, and it’s transferring to the course.

The part I got wrong

A couple of days ago I played a wet, humid nine, got cooked, and putted badly. I told myself the putting number was just fatigue and slow greens — noise, not signal. Move along.

Then the five-round trend: putting flagged as my focus category, slipping, well below where it should be. That’s not one bad nine. It’s a pattern, and it matches something I’d already flagged on my own — my 6-to-10 footers have gone soft. So I was wrong to wave it off, and I’m saying so on purpose. The discipline here is that the data overrules the story I want to tell, even when the story is convenient.

But not the way you’d think

My instinct is to turn 6-to-10 footers into a mechanics project — grind the stroke, add checkpoints, get technical. The Touch and the Professor both talk me off that ledge, and I think they’re right.

The Touch’s whole philosophy is feel and pace over mechanics: a putt from that range doesn’t miss because the stroke broke, it misses because you got tentative and the speed died — and on a breaker, wrong speed means the best line in the world still slides by. The Professor’s process-over-outcome principle points the same direction: commit to a spot, react to it, and get out of your own way. So before I touch anything technical, I’m giving it a week of exactly that. I went from my worst category to my best on the greens once before doing this, so I know how it goes.

Body and base

Legs were a little sore from the walking build, but the knee stayed quiet and today I felt strong. The Doc’s read on that: sore-then-recovered is training load doing its job, not a warning — and since the body governs the ceiling, the knee staying quiet is the green light that the volume is being tolerated. My step average is running ahead of plan, which is exactly when the temptation to accelerate shows up. The Doc’s rule holds: don’t. The qualifier is a year out. Conservative wins.

Net for the week: index down, approach up, putting down, body on schedule. The plan didn’t break — it just told me where to point next. And most of what I know about where to point, I owe to the staff.

Measure the week. Build the base. Play the next one.