I contemplated whether or not sharing this story from a JV girls' golf tournament I took my team to yesterday. However, the more I think about, the more I feel I have to share. I will start off saying that this story is 100% factual. No embellishment at all.

Story time from the chronicles of a JV golf tournament:

9AM shotgun start. Before carting my best two JV players I direct my 5th player with simple directions on how to get to her starting hole. "You walk down this cart path to that red flag. Then you take a left. Your tee box will be about 100 yards away."' After I drop my first two players off I decided to immediately go check to see if she got to the right place. As I'm driving up to the tee box I realize she hadn't so I tell her playing partners, who had already teed off, to wait just a moment while I find her. They graciously waited. When I get her to the teebox, she hit right away and ended up with a bogey on a par five which I was pretty proud of, all things considered.

However, the point of the story I wanted to get to had to do with one of her playing partners on that hole. After I drove ahead to spot my player's tee shot, I watch her playing partner hit her second shot. It seemed like she had a decent swing, and when she made contact, I was like, "That looks like it'll go about 150 yards." But, as I watched the ball fly it kind of looked like when it reached its apex that it started to go backwards. Weird. What was even more weird was that her third shot did the same thing. A few shots later I noticed, she was having a hard time finding her ball so I drove back to help her find it. I found it pretty quickly and immediately realized why the ball seemed to be super spinny. The ball she was using was not a normal golf ball, but in fact, it was a whiffle golf ball…..

I felt bad for the girl, instructed the other girls to go to their ball as I told her to wait a moment while they moved far enough away so I could tell her of her blunder. After I told her, she replied, "Yeah, I noticed after my third shot, but I didn't know what to do." I stood there in disbelief, wondering how did it take her that long? How did she not notice when she picked the ball up to put it on the tee?

lol you can't make this stuff up!

And, slightly in her defense it was a solid whiffle golf ball and not one with holes in it.

insert laugh/cry emoji. wow.

I want to see the pga of america's ruling tips on this one. "What happens if you accidentally start play with something other than a golf ball"

She's playing chess. Going to have HUGE advantage when they roll back the golf ball.

That's pretty good. I've got a similar story.

I played HS golf at an HISD school in a division with only schools in it that weren't low-income disadvantage etc etc. So with that said us and the other school always won our district tourney with everyone on our teams shooting 100+.

Well one year we show up to the district tourney and I get paired up with a guy who's never played golf in his life. Turns out he's a basketball player and the basketball coach bought him and the entire basketball team thrift store clubs and told them if they played they'd get to miss two days of school so they all said yes. Players miss school and coach gets his stipend bonus for coaching golf.

He hits his tee shot off #1 as you'd expect and as he gets up to his ball 30 yards in front of the tee box he bends down to pick it up and put it on a tee. His coach has to run up in the cart and tell him he can't do that. He was shocked he had to hit the ball off the ground.

Can't remember what he shot that day but it was brutal. I'll never forget that.

Great story.

My last 2 years in High School, we had Beaumont Central in our district. Same story as above as the basketball coach asked his favorite 5 kids/athletes if they wanted 2 days off school.

They rolled in and he threw 5 golf bags out of the back of the bus. Right after the bags came flying out, he dropped a trash can full of golf clubs out of the bus. A free for all ensued.

The guy teeing off fourth for them started looking around at the clubs in other people's bags. He pointed to a putter in a competitor's bag and asked what it was. So the kid told him what it was for and the Central kid, realizing he had 10 drivers and a wedge but no putter, says S***! and goes sprinting down the first hole. He runs 420 yards down to the first green… grabs a putter out of his buddy's bag and sprints the whole way back. Not even breathing hard, he explained to us that his buddy had 7 putters in his bag. Damnedest thing I ever saw on the golf course.