The sixth qualifier of the 3rd Annual Gulf Coast Championships Series was scheduled to be played at Riverside Park in Victoria, TX on Saturday December 4th. But the course was 7’ under water after the Guadalupe River came out of her banks the week before.
The tournament was moved to the world-class Circle R courses near Wimberley, TX. The 70% chance or rain held off and we played disc golf in December Texas-style: under sunny skies and 70-degree temperatures.
In my 19th and final sanctioned tournament of the year, I finally won my first PDGA-sanctioned event. (Full event results can be found here).
Unfortunately, I didn’t get to enjoy my victory as much as I would have liked. After the morning round on the grueling Hill course, I was in third place: 5 strokes behind John Frost and 2 strokes behind Jake Sisson.
The three of us comprised the leader card for the afternoon round on the meadow course. None of us shot particularly well…but when we tallied our cards at the end of the round, I finished at +9, John finished at +15, and we had Jake at +10.
I added all the scores up at least three times before heading back to HQ to turn in our card. In fact, just before I handed it in, John Frost and I went over everybody’s scores one more time.
It looked like Jake had won the tournament by 1 stroke over me, while I took 2nd by 1 stroke over Frost.
If you read my last post, I just learned to compute the Doomsday algorithm in my head. But apparently I can’t handle simple arithmetic. The TD informed us that our card had a scoring error.
As it turns out, Jake had shot a +11, which would have tied us for first place with a 126 total for the day. However, turning in a scorecard with an error on it carries a 2-stroke penalty. Instead of tying for 1st place, Jake ended up in a three-way tie for third.
I can’t tell you how much of an ass I felt like, as I was the one doing the math. Thankfully, Jake is a very gracious sportsman and took it as well as can be expected. On the positive side, Jake hit the only ace of the day (Hole #15 on the Hill) to take home the $325 ace pot.
Once again, Jake, I’m sorry it went down like that. But we both know that my first ever win is a shared victory (although, as well as I was shooting the last several holes, I bet I would’ve beat you in the playoff
Anyway, the win should cement my place in the Top Ten amateur point winners Texas this year, and lock in my automatic invite to the PDGA Amateur World Championships next year.
