Two and a half years without breaking 100

I have been playing golf for two and a half years and still have not broken 100. That is a humbling thing to admit after spending countless hours and buckets of balls at the range, but looking back, my results match how I practiced.

Where the strokes actually go

When you shoot over 100, the scorecard rarely falls apart because of a slightly imperfect iron swing from the fairway. Almost all of my wasted strokes happen in two places: off the tee and inside fifty yards.

Off the tee, a sliced driver out of bounds or into hazard is an immediate two-stroke penalty before I have even played the hole. Around the green, a duffed chip followed by a skulled wedge across the fringe turns a routine bogey into a double or triple, and three-putts finish the job. You do not need a tour swing to break 100—you just need to keep the ball in play and get onto the green in one try.

The driving range trap

Despite losing most of my strokes on the tee box and around the greens, I spent nearly all of my practice time machine-gunning balls at the driving range.

Hitting a large bucket off a forgiving rubber mat with no specific target feels productive, but it builds false confidence. If you hit a bad shot at the range, you rake another ball over five seconds later and groove the exact same mistake. Meanwhile, the putting green and chipping area are free, yet I treated them as a five-minute warmup instead of the main event.

Brute force without a feedback loop

In engineering, you would never try to fix a failing system by running the same broken build a hundred times without reading the logs. Yet that is essentially how I approached my swing.

By putting off formal lessons—or not pairing coaching with structured, deliberate drills between sessions—I had no real feedback loop. Feeling and real are famously different in golf; without someone diagnosing the root cause, "practicing more" just meant reinforcing bad habits faster.

The plan going forward is simpler: take proper lessons, slow down at the range with a real target for every ball, keep the tee shot in bounds, and spend half my practice time within thirty yards of the hole.