No obstacle seems too large this year for Scottie Scheffler, the World No. 1 with six wins on the PGA Tour including the Masters, plus his gold medal at the Paris Olympics.
This week, however, he is in the mountains of Colorado. The BMW Championship, the PGA Tour’s second event of the FedEx Cup playoffs, will be played in thin air at a tour-record 8,130 yards long at Castle Pines Golf Club in Castle Rock, Colo.
Scheffler was asked Wednesday about acclimating to the altitude, and he credited a family vacation in July in Telluride, Colo., which he said is “a little bit higher” than Castle Rock. Telluride is 8,754 feet above sea level, while Castle Pines checks in at 6,332.
“… the elevation got to me a little bit,” Scheffler said. “So I’m kind of glad I got it out of the way then because I have struggled with it from time to time.”
He referenced his days on the Korn Ferry Tour, long before his domination on the PGA Tour, with tournaments in Colorado and “pretty extreme elevation” in Bogota, Colombia (nearly 9,000 feet).
“… I remember sleeping really bad the first few nights,” Scheffler said. “You have really weird dreams and you wake up in the middle of the night feeling like you can’t breathe and just weird stuff.
“I felt like that experience playing at a little bit higher altitude has kind of helped me adjust to this week,” he continued. “I was working out in the gym (on Tuesday) and I was definitely getting out of breath a lot faster than I would at home, but I feel like I’m doing a good job of getting adjusted, and then the number stuff is something that we’ve had a system that has worked decent over the past few years, and hoping it continues to work this week.”
The “number stuff” is tracking and analyzing the movement of a golf ball in flight through a portable device such as TrackMan Golf. Scheffler said that he and his caddie Ted Scott don’t change the settings on the device regardless of their location.
“Teddy has a way that I’m not going to divulge because I think we do a really good job of making sure we’re pin high a lot, kind of no matter what the conditions are,” Scheffler said. “That’s something that I rely on him pretty heavily for.”
Shots figure to travel farther this week than at a more typical altitude on tour. The Castle Rock course will have 400 feet of elevation change.
“So this week he’s doing a lot of the math,” Scheffler said of Scott. “We have our numbers and how far the ball goes here, and we still have our numbers at home. So we have two ways we’re trying to do it, depending on the shot, just to where I know that I can get comfortable with the shot we’re trying to hit.
“So some of that is I have a stock number of what the club goes here. So if my 8-iron goes 165 at home, let’s say it’ll go like low 180s here, something like that.”
Scheffler explained that variables can include the time of day, or how long the ball is in the air. Uphill shots spent less time in the air, for example. Downhill shots will be affected by a larger percentage, he said.
“There is a lot of work that goes into it, so it’s a pretty big adjustment for us,” Scheffler said.
Ludvig Aberg, who is making his BMW Championship debut, noted the differences the players face this week. The field of the top 50 players in the points standings are trying to advance to next week, when the top 30 compete for the Tour Championship in lower-elevation Atlanta (about 1,000 feet maximum).
“It presents some challenges for sure a golf course at sea level doesn’t,” Aberg said Wednesday of Castle Pines. “The golf course is really pretty, very beautiful. But it’s quite the walk.”
Aberg told his caddie, Joe Skovron, that he doesn’t think they’ll have a lot of conversations while walking up hills. They’ll be focusing on breathing.
“Playing at elevation or at altitude is a little bit of a challenge, depending on the window that you play it, and that’s what I felt like these first couple days we really tried to get a baseline of those things,” Aberg said. “Then, obviously, it’s going to affect if you knock it down a little bit or get it up in the air.
“But I try to keep it very similar. I don’t try to complicate it. Try to simplify it and make it very similar to how I treat a normal tournament.”
–Field Level Media