By Staff Writer Leo Braveman
Right before covid started my dad started playing a smaller version of tenis called pickleball. He would take me to go early in the morning on some weekdays, and we would go on weekends. When covid hit, the gym we would play at closed, giving us no place to go and play. A few weeks later we went to a park in Cherry Hill NJ where there were pickup games.
Although we started playing before covid, there were constantly new players who would come and learn the game. From that point, the search word “pickleball” has doubled in terms of times googled per hour.
Some time later I was getting tired of pickleball. I had nothing to do, there weren’t people hanging out in the same way, there weren’t sports events to go to, and there weren’t even public parks open. As you can guess, I was on my phone most of the time, and one day I saw a tik tok that said “Favorite course in the Philadelphia area?”.
I looked in the comments and the name of the golf course was “Riverwinds”. In the next few days I thought about the idea of golfing, it’s funny to think about now but to be honest I wasn’t really interested in the sport, but the idea of getting to drive a golf cart seemed really fun to me.
Later that week me and my dad went to the golf course to play. With golf being such a unique sport, there weren’t the same regulations stopping people from playing like with other sports in the city going online, or parks closing. When I played I was awful, not only at playing but also at driving the cart which I would not be allowed to do after the first minute of it. Even though I played really bad, I ended up going back to golf with it being such a perfectly fit sport for covid, playing a couple times a week now. I wouldn’t say i’m good, but compared to my game when I played only to drive the cart I’m amazing!
Recently I have been playing golf, but in a different way. Covid, which made me start playing, also made me stop being able to do the commute to the course with it decreasing and life getting more normal. Because it’s hard to get a ride to the course, I shifted into playing in a simulator, which some gyms have and it’s a much closer drive, being able to stay in the city. For me I know I have drastically improved. Of course I only have the data I can get from the simulator, but I hope that when the time comes on the course I’ll be able to enjoy the game more with the hopefully new way I’ll play.
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