The Register Forum spoke to student athlete Jack Goldfinger about his experiences with playing golf at CRLS.

Register Forum (RF): What makes Cambridge golf special to you?

Jack Goldfinger (JG): Cambridge golf is a great space to build a community and to learn about self-improvement. We all understand that there are teams who are going to be … more competitive than us, simply because they’ve been playing for … longer, but we learn not to put ourselves down because of a … bad day of playing. We focus on improving our own skills over time, and we’re able to make a light situation out of even the worst outcomes.

RF: Are there any moments from your golf career that you remember clearly?

JG: Near the end of my last year of golf, I started to play badly a lot. I couldn’t seem to get my swing in place (probably because I was nervous), and a lot of the time the ball would end up going too far left or right. I told my coach that I didn’t want to play in the varsity game that week, but he pushed me to because he wanted me to be able to play in one more before I was done. Predictably, I … lost my matchup by a significant margin. But afterwards, the only thing that my coach had to say was that he was proud of me. He knew how hard it could be when you just can’t seem to play well, and don’t know what the problem is, but I was able to play through it and look back on the match lightly, which he said was difficult to do. To me, that’s what the CRLS team and the coaches are all about. They don’t care if you do a sub-par (wink) job on the golf course.

RF: What does it mean to you to be a CRLS athlete?

JG: Being a CRLS athlete feels different from being an athlete in any other school. The teams that we’ve played … seem to lack the same sense of positivity and humility that our team has. When they shank a ball into the woods, as we all do at some point or another, they get angry about it, and have a hard time moving on. This is of course a natural reaction for a golf player who’s exceptionally talented, but I’ve always been impressed by the ability of our team members (even the most talented players) to laugh it off quickly. That way, you have a much more positive effect on your team members and yourself. Having also played baseball, I’ve noticed that this is a behavior that’s common among CRLS athletes. It is definitely important to be competitive, and sometimes it’s a sign of commitment when you get that worked up about a mistake, but I think that it brings us closer together as individual teams and a school when we’re able to look on the bright side of our failures and not always take ourselves so seriously, because then we can move on and think about doing better in the future.

This piece also appears in our November 2021 print edition.