Oswego East junior Logan Hong is the Record Newspapers Boys Golfer of the Year

Oswego East junior Logan Hong, who finished 72nd at the Class 3A state tournament with a two-day score of 12-over 165, is the Record Newspapers Boys Golfer of the Year.

Hong took 12th at the sectional meet with a score of 76, and shot an 80 to tie for eighth at the regional meet.

During the regular season Hong shot a 75 at the Warrior Invite at The Den in Bloomington for 10th, shot a 74 (3-over) at the Plainfield North Invite for fourth and ended the season with a team-low 38.38 nine-hole average.

Here is his Q&A with Sports Editor Joshua Welge.

How would you assess your season as a whole?

Hong: Well, to be frank, I would assess it as pretty unsuccessful. For the most part, the team and I had our highs. Going 9-1 as a team is no small feat. But our lows were pretty terrible and they didn’t allow us to advance to sectionals like we did the last two years. Additionally, considering my goal was to go 10-0 as a team, I definitely feel like I myself was unsuccessful. The one loss we took against Plainfield North, the other team played well, but we didn’t play well as a team, and I wasn’t able to pull the team through to the win.

I think as a team we did a good job pulling for one another. There were matches over the season where guys would really show up and play well when others were having a tougher day. It was truly a beautiful thing to see. Growing up, I always thought of golf as a one-man sport, but this year, seeing other guys come in clutch when we needed them to, it was truly special.

Looking back on the season as a whole, I definitely can see how much I’ve improved since my freshman year on varsity. However, I still believe that we should’ve gone further. I’m a very nitpicky person at the core, so all I can see is how much more I have to improve in order to take the team to that next level.

What was your state experience like? Were you satisfied with your result?

Hong: I’ve been asked this question a lot by my teachers and friends. Everyone at state was super kind to me. Coaches of other teams, the workers at the golf course, everyone was super supportive and kind. I actually had a guy who came up to me after round one and said that he would pray for me to help me make the cut and play day two of state. That moment was pretty special. As a Christian myself, I’ll always remember that man’s kindness. It was my first time at state.

To answer the question “am I satisfied with my result,” absolutely not. I can’t. I truthfully cannot. Making it to state, and making it to state was a huge accomplishment. Without a doubt. It’s been something I’ve been working for since the 8th grade. But I like to win. And really anything less than that isn’t something I’m satisfied with.

It looks like your results were quite consistent, 38.38 for 9 hole average and 18-hole tournaments in the 70s. How were you able to maintain that consistency? Besides the postseason was there a tournament that stood out as a highlight?

Hong: The two things that helped me remain consistent, was basic course management, and putting. I’ll start with putting since my experience with it feeds into course management. Putting is important. Without a doubt. I won’t go into the common knowledge that you have to get the ball into the hole if you want to score, and you generally will have the most opportunities to do that with your putter. Instead, I want to go into the artistry of putting.

While it’s not something that people want to read about (and I know it’s not something that’s easily understood), being creative with the putter was a genuine part of my development that helped me achieve what I did this season. Back in late July, I began experimenting with hooking my putts. It’s pretty weird considering the traditional way to putt. But what I found when I did this was that it didn’t cause the ball to veer left when putting. Instead it helped me do two things: roll the ball straighter, and helped me tap into my creativity. Prior to hooking my putts, I struggled with the putt slicing on putts under pressure. Hooking the putts helped free up my stroke and allowed me to start rolling the ball on my intended line, and hold that line. Furthermore, my newly freed stroke allowed me to hit more putts at a variety of speeds.

I said putting helped me with my course management. I’ll explain that part here. Like I said before, putting helped me access my creativity. With longer shots, say 150 yards, there’s a new element too the shot: sidespin. In practice, I began experimenting with different shot shapes. Learning to work the ball with different curvatures, trajectories, and spin rates was a big deal with course management.

How do you feel you grew as a player this year?

Hong: As a player, I finally got my majority of the game to be good at the same time. Instead of having one part of my game being really good and everything really bad, this year I made an emphasis on making my chipping and putting consistent enough where I could use it as a crutch on days where I wasn’t controlling the ball very well. As a person, I grew closer to God, and I think that’s helped me mature more as a person. Growing closer to God has helped me gain wisdom and an understanding of how to handle pressure.

How did you get started in golf? What do you like about the sport?

Hong: This is a weird question for me. When I was 8, I was forced to play golf. At the time, I was living in Texas with my sister and my mom, while my dad lived in Chicago. My parents were still together, but since my sister wanted to pursue gymnastics, my parents decided to move my sister to gymnastics, and I followed suit. Since my mom is a dentist, it meant she worked a lot, and wouldn’t ever be home until 8 p.m.. So from the time I got off the bus from elementary school, I was pretty much on my own. So, my dad decided to put me into golf so that I could be watched over by the people who ran the golf course. He also said I needed to learn to “focus my mind.” I’ve always suspected myself to have ADHD or something like that, so I guess that makes sense. My brain’s always off doing something that’s not really paying attention to the present. It’s pretty chaotic to live with.

I think what got me hooked to golf was actually above six years later when I was 14, where I started learning to curve the ball by watching Tiger Woods play on YouTube. Watching Tiger do so much with the ball, and watching him explain how he did it was really fascinating to me. Working the golf ball to me is like a trial and error experiment. I’ve used the analogy, “scientist in practice, engineer on the golf course.” And basically what that meant was trying to hit different shots in practice that would change the trajectory of the ball flight, the spin rate, and the curvature of the ball which would cause the ball to react in so many different ways once it came back down and touched the Earth. I think that’s when I started making progress with my golf game because a lot of my experiments were done around the chipping and putting greens.