Mind Game
Golf takes astute patience and tremendous control, of both the body and mind. Junior finance major Chris Crawford has spent four years perfecting this formula and earned Drexel’s first-ever title of CAA Men’s Golfer of the Year. His secret? “Be in the moment.”
You don’t win at golf just by swinging straighter, hitting harder, driving cleaner. You win by thinking better. “A big part of it is, what is going on in your head,” says Chris Crawford. “At a highly competitive level everyone can play, so you have to find something else, some mental strength: Staying focused, staying in the moment.”
Crawford should know. As the Bensalem, Pennsylvania, native enters his fourth year at Drexel, he has achieved a place among the top golfers on the college circuit today and recognition as Drexel’s first-ever Colonial Athletic Association (CAA) Men’s Golfer of the Year.
It’s also the third year in which the 21 year old has received league honors, as he was named CAA Rookie of the Year and to the All-CAA Second Team in 2013. He finished in the Top 10 in every tournament he played in during the 2014–15 season and had a league-best average score of 71.76 over 25 rounds.
These are significant achievements in a game where so many variables can throw you off. Wind speed, the quality of the grass — such subtle points can cost a player a stroke here or there. As Crawford sees it, the way to overcome these obstacles begins with the mental game. His coach agrees.
“He has a good heart, good nerves. You have to have the skills, but you also need that mental capacity, and you’ve got to have heart,” says Mike Dynda, Drexel’s head golf coach, who has worked with Crawford steadily since the young golfer came to the University. “The first time I ever saw him play, I saw a maturity beyond his age. I saw someone with the ability to make decisions in the heat of the moment.”
When he isn’t on the links, Crawford has done his co-op work with Horsham, Pennsylvania-based Paragon Surety Group, a financial underwriter. As an accounting major, he’s found it to be a natural fit. “I have really enjoyed the finance classes at Drexel. I wasn’t a calculus guy growing up, but I like these applicable concepts with numbers. This makes sense to me,” he says.
Just as the hands-on nature of accounting appeals to him, it’s the practical nature of golf — connecting that club to the ball — that gets him most excited, more so than any of those awards.
“Honors like that are nice to get. It is nice to be recognized at the end of the season, but I don’t play for them necessarily,” he says. “You play as well as you can individually, and it is only going to help the team, but I don’t think about the awards when I am playing.”
Nor does Crawford spend much time worrying about the other players teeing off all around him. “I don’t really think about anyone else. I can only control what I am doing,” he says. “It can be nice to know where you stand on the leader board in a tournament, especially later on, but even then I can’t control what anyone else does. I can only control what I do, and if I feel like I have done that as well as I could, then I can live with the result.”
If the awards don’t motivate, and the competition does not distract, what is it that helps him to hone that mental game? How does he get himself into that unique zone of focus that makes winning possible? Three words: Practice, practice, practice.
“You have to have the work ethic, you have to practice constantly,” he says. That means a lot of time spent in Drexel’s indoor golf facility in the Daskalakis Athletic Center, where Crawford swings his clubs all through the winter, when outdoor play isn’t possible. “I play almost every day, hitting balls on the range, playing, putting, just mentally visualizing.
So much of the game is just about repetition.” So far all that repetition has led to repeated wins, and we are likely to see more as Crawford continues his stellar career.