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Last week marked my favorite golf day of the year, and it had nothing to do with the course, or how I played. It’s because Golf Digest’s Seitz Cup, our annual intrasquad competition pitting old staffers vs. young, taps into all the compelling elements of golf with very little of the baggage. (I was on the geezer team. Thank you for at least pretending that was in question.)

The Seitz Cup will never be called pure golf. We play a two-person scramble match-play format with a handicap system that no one quite understands. There was trash talk, music playing out of portable speakers and, at least for the young team, tiny bottles of Fireball liquor wrapped in cellophane goodie bags. Whatever the Golf Digest company tournament was when the magazine started in 1950, this wasn’t it.

But the format also invites strategy, and the tiny flutter of nerves over 12-footers for birdie. When the golf was over (Old Team prevails!), we sidled up to the bar and analyzed the back-and-forth of matches as if we just played the Ryder Cup.

It’s hard to say if the Seitz Cup makes you a better golfer. But it makes you more excited about golf, so it probably doesn’t hurt.

Where the Seitz Cup also succeeds is in bringing together a wider cross-section of golfers than you’d expect from a golf company. We have scratch players and beginners, a healthy middle of the bell curve, plus the dreaded once-a-year dabblers who don’t carry a handicap and yet still hit the ball better than I do. There is no one golf perspective at Golf Digest. There are dozens.

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That’s why, in the aftermath, it seemed a waste not to canvas the field with questions that might yield new insights into how different golfers play and process the game. I constructed a survey of 16 questions ranging from players’ equipment preferences to the shots they dread under pressure to ways they’ve displayed anger on the golf course (which could have been reframed as, “Am I the only one who …?”).

Below, based on responses from more than two dozen golfers, are the most interesting takeaways.

We’re basically a microcosm of the golf population

Some of the questions were to get a general sense of playing style—swing speed, how far you hit certain clubs, that sort of thing. For starters, it’s worth noting that the median Handicap Index in the Seitz Cup was 11.5, and the average 11.1. This is precisely where I fall, reaffirming my qualifications as a voice of the everyman. Mind you, the national average is 14.2, and a handful of advanced players on our staff skew some of the data on average swing speed and 7-iron distance a bit, but in general, we cover the full spectrum of male and female golfers.

Most of us are head cases, too

Is everyone on our staff as obsessed about their swing as I am? I asked a handful of questions about how players think about their games and what they believe is holding them back.

A question about what players liked about their swing produced colorful answers: “Tempo”, “Looks nice,” and my personal favorite, “It’s kind of like the post office—It’s inefficient and kind of a nightmare but also somehow works.”

More telling was what players said they didn’t like.

“The over-the-top start of my downswing.”

“Like my writing, it’s very stilted and lacks flow.”

“Old man halfway backswing.”

This tied well to a question about what players believed they needed the most help with to reach the next level.

And which shots in particular players dread facing in crunch time.

Coming from a group of golf nerds, another revealing question was to share a recent swing tip that had clicked. I should probably say here Golf Digest is not necessarily endorsing these tips for you, only that these worked for some of us.

“Flash the camera’ — rotate my hips back on the backswing.”

“Shoulders closed to target at setup.”

“Driving the right (trail) shoulder down and left to initiate downswing and help keep me shifting and rotating in posture (I struggle mightily with early extension).”

“I’ve been using the ‘step through’ drill on the range a lot this year to make sure I keep shifting and rotating forward through impact to a full finish. (I tend to hang back.)”

“Use the putter whenever possible – no more wedge chunks.”

Finally, further confirming that we’re just like other golfers, I felt compelled to ask about how players processed on-course frustration, or more precisely, the specific ways they might have acted like an idiot this year.

Most were at least honest. The most common answer was about a golf club slammed to the ground, followed by “cursed loud enough for people to hear on the next hole.” There was some ball-swatting off the green, a few heated verbal altercations with other players in the group, and at least one confession of property damage.

“I made fun of (redacted) for his habit of breaking clubs, then three weeks later I broke a club for the first time,” one respondent wrote. “I take everything back, it felt fantastic.”

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com