Northeast Ohio Golf contributor Derek Duda is working as professional caddie and greens reader for Jacob Scott this week in La Quinta, CA at the Finals of the 2014 PGA Tour Q-School. Derek will provide daily updates on his man plus Northeast Ohio natives Ryan Armour and Justin Lower as they make their way through six rounds of qualifying.
The third installment of The Duda Report: 2014 Q-School Finals appears below. Watch Northeast Ohio Golf (or Twitter / Facebook) for these stories each day. Follow Derek on Twitter @GougeNCheque
Thursday December 12th: Round 1
As I sit awake rummaging through my yardage books at 3:30am the morning before Round 1, I ask myself, “Have we missed anything?” We have put in a ton of preparation over the past 3 days to map out a game plan for both the Stadium and Nicklaus Tournament Courses. All of the fun begins today in less than 5 short hours. Jake tees off at 1020am Pacific on #10 of the Stadium course. It is a demanding tee shot on the starting hole of perhaps the toughest of the 4 nines that we are playing this week here at PGA West.
It was nice that the traffic on each of the courses thinned out yesterday. We ended up playing 27 holes, which is unheard of the day before a tournament. Especially one that emphasizes endurance golf like the 108 hole Web.com qualifying Tournament. Jake feels he learns golf courses better strictly through repetition. We played the Stadium Course in the morning, grabbed some lunch and then decided to play another 9 holes on the front side of the Nicklaus Tournament Course. It was 2pm and literally nobody was on the golf course. We completed 9 holes walking in just over an hour. Jake was in good form and ended up shooting 32 (-4) which filled him with confidence heading into this morning.
It is wonderful to have Coach Tom Porten out here yesterday. We spent a great deal of time practicing before we started to play. Tom made a few slight alignment adjustments with Jake and he started to stripe shots on a consistent line and trajectory. With all of the preparation behind us we can now focus on tournament golf. Jake is excited to get things starts. The scoreboards are up as are the gallery ropes. It is a great atmosphere.
Justin Lower and Ryan Armour also finished their preparation yesterday and are ready to go. Best of luck to all of the boys from NEOH.
Feel free to follow the live scoring. We will have walking scorers with us. so hole by hole updates will be available here.
D2
