The longest day of 2026 was last Saturday. In extreme northern parts of Alaska, the sun won’t even go down on solstice day. In Anchorage, it goes down for a couple hours. It’s a nice excuse to stay up all night playing golf, but I didn’t do that.

I didn’t play golf at all that day, but I did play three times this past week, more than doubling my 2026 play time. The grass on the courses had doubled in thickness from the week before. As I’ve mentioned, June is a magical month for growth.

So, the courses are ready to go and set up for July to be a nice month of golf. Before we get to the month of junior championships, we have one Alaska golf major left in June.

The state match play championship is going on at Settlers Bay as I write this on the last Saturday of the month. Sadly, there are no results posted anywhere from Friday’s qualifying round and no bracket posted to follow along with the matches. So, I guess we will have to wait until next week to see who the winner was.

I nearly decided to cancel my cancelation and play in the match play event anyway, but I’m glad it didn’t work out. It would have been a long drive to Settlers Bay just to shoot a bad score.

I played the Moose Run Creek Course twice this week, on back-to-back days. Despite hitting the ball incredibly well, I shot 86 on Tuesday and 90 on Wednesday. I actually played better on Wednesday; another illustration of how score means nothing when evaluating one’s game. My game is great and it is only a matter of time until the scores reflect it. For that reason, both days were heavenly.

We have two months left in golf season and need to make the most of it. I hope to squeeze in two rounds per week for a total of 8-10 rounds in the month of July. I plan to play no tournaments in that time and completely focus on sharpening my game.

I have decided the best practice is play and that the driving range is a complete waste of time. You can only do one thing at the driving range and that is groove a swing. You can’t simulate playing golf, no matter how much imagination you use. After 40 years of golf, I’ve reached a point that bad golf scores are never a result of a bad swing. My swing is grooved as it can be. It’s always matter of touch and feel that lead to being slightly off target and making bogeys.

Hitting beautiful, flushed golf shots that lead to bogeys is still enjoyable as can be. Joy isn’t found in writing the number on the scorecard. Joy is in the shots, so get out and hit some while you have a chance.

I recommend the Creek, as it was in nice shape. They always have the best fairways to hit from.

I cancelled my registration for the state match play tournament.

I played my first round of the summer Sunday and clearly was not ready for tournament play. Though my game is very good in many ways, it was clear strokes were destined to pile up too high to be competitive.

Golf is such a game of touch and feel. It can’t be replicated on a driving range. You have to do so much more than just line up your shots. You must have feel for putts, for chips, for wind, for side slopes, for bad lies.

The Anchorage Golf Course was in nice shape and looks destined for good things as summer progresses. The greens were slow, as one might expect this time of year, but there was lots of grass on them.

The round left me full of optimism for the next few months. I’ll be blogging my way along for those who have interest.

I went and signed up for the state match play tournament. That’s the mistake, in case you were in suspense.

I still haven’t played a single hole of golf in Alaska this summer. I hit three buckets of golf balls this week, though, the most I’ve hit yet this summer. I’m not too sure that the driving range is really all that helpful, however.

Alaskan golf is funny in the sense that you really can’t practice putting and chipping before July. If you were to try to go out to the short-game area at a local course in June, what little grass there is won’t be anything like the greens you will see in the tournament.

Grass, and everything from pumpkins to tree leaves, grows so fast in June it boggles the mind. We go from nearly no grass on June 1st to shaggy green carpets by the middle of the month. The greenskeepers are so happy to see the grass growing, they don’t cut it until they have to.

Seriously, I don’t think that is the greenskeeper’s reasoning, but they do let the grass grow in for a while before deciding to trim it up. By the very end of June, just as the match play tournament takes place, the greens might be sort of decent to putt on.

Until then, we are left with hitting range balls into dirt driving ranges. You can get some sense of the direction you are hitting the ball, but no sense of distance or turf reaction. The courses are still in such poor shape at this early season, you can’t get much touch and feel on the course either. All this leads to a massive amount of uncertainty when teeing it up in the first big tournament.

For several years, I’ve played in tournaments not to compete, but to participate and just to have a tee time. I like seeing all my golf friends and having an excuse to get out and golf. I’ve played relatively horrible for years, though, and I would like that to change.

I ran into Chris Morin just the other day and reminisced about the time we both played well in the state match play tournament. We figured out it was 12 or 13 years ago, when I beat him to reach the semifinals. I played in the final foursome with Greg Sanders, Adam Baxter and Marcus Dolejsi. Maybe I got nervous, maybe I got tired, but I bombed that day.

The two days prior, I played what I would call the best golf I’ve played in Alaska in the past 20 years. What did I do different? I practiced every day for six weeks leading up to the event. It paid off big time. The practice shaved six shots off my normal scoring. Instead of shooting 76 or 78 on a good day, I was breaking par.

As my schedule became more busy in following years, I’ve been driven to discover how to play par golf with no practice. I haven’t solved it yet, but I guess the match-play event will be my next chance to test it out. It may end up being my first round of the year.

As we get nearer to the event and the roster of players is finalized, I’ll do my best to write some sort of preview of the state match play tournament.

I hit one bucket of golf balls this week, or as I refer to them: pellets of joy. I do love striking golf balls. There isn’t anything quite like it. The sky was a soft blue with wispy, white clouds meandering above the Anchorage Golf Course driving range. The range was packed and some were muttering it was too hot, which means the weather was awesome.

I discovered something in my swing and hit the ball well enough that I am tempted to sign up for the State Match Play event. I’ve been on a mission for years to discover the method for golf that allows one to play great with no practice. I’m close to finding it.

I just finished a book about Ben Hogan, and within that book there are stories about how Hogan could never beat Byron Nelson in a tournament. Yet, Nelson never practiced. Granted, Nelson played rounds of golf nearly every day. He just didn’t grind on the driving range like Hogan. In those days, according the book, no professional practiced like Hogan, who basically invented the modern driving-range routines that many golfers utilize today.

I haven’t played a round of golf yet and surely won’t be able to this week. Whether I sign up for the match play event will depend on whether I have time. I’d have to decide very soon, as the roster may already be full. Anyone interested can click here to get details.

The word jackpot could easily refer to our lucky weather pattern of late. Sunny and 70 degrees was the norm for most of the week, which means summer arrived before the first week of June ended.

The Alaska Golf Association’s Spring Jackpot took place Saturday, as well, and I feel like I hit the jackpot when I visited the AGA website and found the live scoreboard front and center.

There was a time it was very difficult to look up scoring for events, but apparently that is no longer the case. In this budding world of AI, it seems silly for a journalist to do things the old-fashioned way. Why try to report news, when people can ask Gemini or Grok and find out who won the tournament.

If you don’t know yet, the winner of the gross division was the duo of Rich Teders and Rob Nelson. They shot five under par at Settlers Bay to win by two shots over Aaron Roth and Erik Thompson.

There was a Heath Martin sighting on the leaderboard. He partnered with Hunter Blake to shoot a couple over par. This is notable, because Martin doesn’t usually participate in the AGA events, for reasons unknown. This isn’t a criticism, just an observation. I’m sure the event was better for his presence, however, so I’m glad he played.

I consider this a nice trial run for how I will record events from a distance. Gone are the days in which a journalist has to travel out to an event to track down scores. If this first event of 2026 serves as an indicator, I’ll have no trouble tracking things throughout the summer.

Of course, if I can show up in person and get some good stories to add to the journal, I will do so.

For those who don’t know, Nelson and Teders probably would have been the favorites to win if oddsmakers were involved. Both were ranked No. 1 in my rankings at one time, both have won state titles and both are seasoned vets who know their way around Settlers Bay.

The next AGA event is the State Match Play tournament, also to be held at Settlers Bay. Competitors have until late June to be polished and ready to battle head to head. Briggs Winfree won the event last summer, beating Erik Thompson in the final match.

I consider myself a lifelong golfer with a vast measure of experience in tournaments and casual rounds alike. Still, I know most people don’t want to read about me, so I’ll title my personal journal entries in such a way that makes them easy to skip.

Those who know me know I was a professional journalist at one time and that gave way to the Alaska Golf Blog, which lasted about five years. That was more than a decade ago, however, and I’ve come to learn the youngsters of today have no idea about all that. This is probably for the best, because it gives me a chance for a fresh start.

Time, or lack of it, killed the golf blog, but I learned a lot from those days. On a personal level, I learned there is only so much time and energy in a day, and I burned up far more than I should have trying to play golf and write about it while trying to manage a real life.

So, my plans going forward are to write on weekends, when I have time to focus and pour some energy into it. Even at that, posts may be short and limited.

I took some time this morning to decide if I will play in the AGA tournaments. I so badly want to, but every time I start to think about it, the idea brings stress. If I think ahead toward a summer with no tournaments, the stress vanishes.

It’s pretty simple: A week of work followed by an entire weekend of golf, followed by another week of work is a grind I’ve lived too many times and it causes neglect in other important areas of my life.

So, I wish all the competitors out there a great summer. I’ll be watching from a distance and doing my best to report results here on my blog. If I can make it out to the events and do some interviews like the old days I will, but I won’t promise such.

I’ve hit one bucket of balls so far, here in Alaska, but I may increase that to two or three this week, as golf season officially starts with June.

The ability to golf on grass brings joy to every golfer’s heart, and with temperatures forecasted as high as 70 this coming week, grass will be growing. The nearly 20 hours of daylight will make it grow fast.

So, let’s pretend you were a competitive-minded golfer living in Anchorage and you were new to the area. You looked up the local Alaska Golf Association events and found a limited list.

The limitations are calendar-based, a three-month window to provide competitive opportunities. I applaud the AGA for the schedule they came up with this year. There are two events in June, the Spring Jackpot and the State Match Play Championship, both to be played at Settlers Bay.

The Jackpot is a popular event that gives golfers a chance to pair up with a partner and use three unique formats over 18 holes to try to secure a trophy and some side cash. It is not regarded as top-notch competition. The focus is more on fun and social interaction, a good way to ring in the new season in the first week of June.

The match-play event is perhaps the toughest competitive event to win, though generally considered the second most important tournament in the state to the State Am. If you were a competitor looking to make a mark, this would be the event to target.

The outside world barely knows this event exists, but the golf insiders greatly respect anyone who wins it. Briggs Winfree won last summer and is on the list to defend his title. He is a left-handed high schooler who practices all winter in the Carolinas. He is a force to be reckoned with.

If you were starting from scratch this spring after nine months off, you would have about three weeks to sharpen your game and be capable of breaking par at Settlers Bay. This not impossible, but it is daunting.

One requirement to entry is posting at least eight scores on Alaskan courses in the past 18 months, so there is a good reason to head out to Settlers and test your skills. After an 18-hole qualifying round, the top 16 players in each division (men, senior men and women) will face off in a match-play, single-elimination bracket. This means, assuming the bracket is full, the champs will play two matches per day on the weekend. This makes for a lot of golf against top-notch players, thereby making it a major grind.

I’m going to stop here and leave July for another post, but I promise July will have a lot more grass and a lot more competitive events. As you may guess, August is the grande finale.

June, July and August make up the primary golf season in Alaska. We’ve got about a week to go before it starts. Some courses are open, some are not. The buds have barely started to bloom on the trees, as nighttime temperatures are still in the 30s.

While spring hasn’t been much of one, hope springs in golfers’ hearts as they dream of winning the State Am and earning a spot in the U.S. Amateur. This has become the big prize in recent years, since the Alaska Golf Association has melded into the Pacific Northwest Golf Association.

There are some big management changes in the AGA this year as well, and I recommend you visit the akgolf.org for some of those details.

The biggest tournament changes include making the State Am field smaller and more competitive, while also adding two state junior championships, one for little kids and one for older.

There are even more changes to discuss as summer progresses, and I’m planning to blog about them here as much as possible. I’ll leave it at that for now, with plans to take it one day at a time and see what I’m capable of. One thing is for sure, the season will begin soon and it will be fun and eventful. I’m excited to see how it goes.

In a showdown of two state match play champions, Sam Olson beat Marcus Dolejsi at Palmer Golf Course on Wednesday. Olson never trailed in the match, eventually prevailing 3 up.

This was a rematch of last summer’s battle won by Dolejsi, just before he went on to win the state match play title.

I was unable to witness this latest confrontation, but I did get to shake each player’s hand at the fifth tee as our paths crossed briefly. Dolejsi was one down at the time, because of an overly aggressive birdie putt, he said.

Both players were dressed like pros and playing from the blue tees. Maybe next time I’ll be able to capture some visual proof for the fans.

Until then, I’ll update my rankings to include two players.