Good Team Practice Isn’t An Accident
26 Sep 2014

Good Team Practice Isn’t An Accident

By: Ben Bryant, WGCA contributing writer “Hey Coach, what are we doing today?” That’s a question that should never have to be asked at a high school golf practice.  By the second or third practice of your season, your players should know what to expect out of a typical golf team practice.  How you organize and run your golf team practices says a lot about you as a coach, and will have a great effect on the ability of your players.  Putting out a couple of buckets for your players to hit while you sit in the pro shop, or peruse the Internet on your phone is fine, but it won’t do much to help your players compete, and it certainly won’t do much to help earn you their respect. Creating a successful golf team program requires careful planning and consideration of your players’ abilities, your own ability to teach the competitive game, and how successful you want your program to be. The Warmup (5-10 minutes) The first part of any successful practice begins with the warmup.  Before any balls are hit, you may find it useful to perform some team stretching exercises.  Have your players stand in a circle and run through a set of stretches.  Choose one of your team captains to lead the stretching.  You can use the time to talk to each player one by one, but it should last no longer than 5-10 minutes.  You can choose to participate yourself or not.  This ritual is useful not only to avoid injury for those players who want to rip some drives first thing in the afternoon, but it also serves as a signal that practice has started.  It’s important to flip that mental switch to let your players know that it’s time to work.  Additionally, it will help build a team atmosphere as all players – both team veterans and new players – go through the same routine every day.  The Range (15-20 minutes) Time on the range can be structured or unstructured, based on your team needs and your ability as a golf instructor.  In a structured range session, you may have all of your players hitting balls with certain restrictions in place, such as all players using the same club, hitting for the same flag, etc.  This might be useful in some circumstances, but most players will lose interest very quickly.  It could be useful for a team full of brand new players and therefore you need to keep their attention on you.  More commonly, time on the range is unstructured, meaning they are free to warm up as they see fit.  As the coach, your job is to move from player to player as needed and offer assistance if asked, or if a player is particularly struggling.  Lastly, it is important to emphasize range safety at all time. Drill Baby, Drill (10 minutes) Drills aren’t fun.  So despite being a necessary evil, they should be kept short.  Drills might be something you organize for the whole team or for an individual player if you notice a glaring need. For example, if during a golf match, you notice several players struggling to hit good bunker shots.  During the next practice, make that an area of need for the team and conduct a brief 10-minute bunker drill after range time. Get On The Course (As Long As You’ve Got!) Ultimately, there is little practice better than actually playing the game on a golf course.  Hopefully, you will have access to one for your practices.  The majority of practice time should be spent on the golf course.  Players should be divided up into groups based on ability.  However, there’s nothing to stop you from creating heterogeneous groups if you have a compelling reason, such as giving a player an opportunity to learn from his more talented and experienced teammates.  As the coach, your job will be to move between groups, giving assistance where needed and requested. If you are a coach who is not well-versed in the golf swing or adept at giving teaching advice, there is still the opportunity to remind players of things like etiquette, speed of play, etc. The vast majority of your daily practice time should be spent on the golf course. Putt It Out (5-10 minutes) All practices should end on the putting green. You can choose one on the course, or make it the practice green near the pro shop to ensure that all players have returned from the course.  It’s a good idea at the end to have some reflection time about what your players should be focusing on that day or week or month.  A fun way to end practices is with a friendly putting competition between your players. Not only is it good practice, but it once again serves to build the bonds of your team. Conclusion A well-run practice does not happen by accident.  It is going to require a great deal of planning and preparation, especially early in the season.  You’ll find, though, that by sticking to a well-regulated schedule such as the one above, your practices will begin to run themselves. Ideally, you want to be able to focus on the more important things like ensuring your players are learning and enjoying themselves on the golf course.
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JUMPING THE GUN ON THE DEATH OF GOLF
15 Sep 2014

JUMPING THE GUN ON THE DEATH OF GOLF

Headlines about golf have made CNN’s, CNBC’s, Fox News’, and many other TV news’ broadcasts lately. Normally, that would be great. A new Tiger Woods that the public, golfers and non-golfers, are excited about wasn’t the news headline. The reports were all about how the game of golf was in trouble and the game was in jeopardy of going the way of the dinosaurs. Let’s put some perspective on the situation. These uninformed opinions are based on three things. Let’s examine those things that have brought about such a panic. First, golf OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) sales have been dragging for well over a year now. Second, Dick’s Sporting Goods dismissed 468 golf professionals in one day. Third, golf courses are closing at a rate of 160 per year. For the OEMs, the problem is serious. The flood of merchandise on the market is overwhelming the equipment business. Consumers have greater outlets to get rid of equipment they don’t want by using the Internet or the PGA trade-in program. The great news about this for the OEMs were the sales numbers from 2006 through 2012. The bad news derived from this is that it created a false market ceiling. The OEMs hired more employees and expanded their product lines. They also increased distribution significantly, all based on a retail market that was somewhat of a fantasy, much the same way as the false housing market for which our economy paid the painful price the last six years. Now the sales have plummeted for some companies and their retail accounts. This has led to bad publicity when earnings reports are announced every quarter. Of course, this has also unfortunately led to layoffs. To make matters worse, sales increases in 2012 were based on one product, the original Taylor Made Rocket Ballz line of clubs. It was easily one of the most successful product launches in golf equipment history. The problem with a successful product line such as this is the near impossible task of increasing or even matching the sales the following year. Short product cycles are another sin of the OEMs. This practice really turns off consumers. In my opinion, the companies are getting exactly what they deserve right now. For Dick’s. the situation is complicated and many-faceted. The easy answer is what we covered about OEMs: a successful product launch, a false growth of sales. With the combination of poor management, poor hiring and poor training, the professionals employed by Dick’s were doomed. Only unrealistic sales could have saved them. I worked for Dick’s for two years, so I have very intimate knowledge of their issues. Regardless, this obviously makes the golf business health look worse than it is. Finally, all the courses closing. Very simply and honestly, we built too many golf courses in the early 2000s, and too many difficult courses. With the advent of online discount sites like GolfNow, greens fees plummeted. The laws of supply and demand were bound to catch up with the golf courses eventually. So, here we are. Is it as bad as the news would lead you to believe? No, not even close. Golf will never die, and the gloom and doom is offset by many positive signs. Junior participation is better than ever. Some regions of the country are showing increased rounds played. Executive courses and shorter courses are getting more popular. Country club memberships are on the rebound. Will the big international equipment companies continue to downsize? Yes. They need to. Will more courses close? Yes. They need to in order to balance the supply and demand system and increase green fees. Don’t believe all the negativity. The indicators the media focuses on are not indicative of reality. Just because a huge corporation is having issues does not mean golf is doomed. The game of golf will be fine, and its strengths are the all the things we love about it: fresh air, exercise, beautiful courses, the enjoyment of watching the ball fly, and the challenge of the game. Our obligation as teachers and golf professionals is to be positive and be great ambassadors of the game.
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DOES THE TEACHER GET TOO MUCH CREDIT?
12 Sep 2014

DOES THE TEACHER GET TOO MUCH CREDIT?

Sean Foley and Tiger Woods have gone separate ways. Tour pros hire instructors. Tour pros change instructors. Instructors sometimes coerce pros to hire them with some formula they claim is the secret to better golf. Does the instructor really make the pro? I believe more often it is the other way around. Most of the players are special talents to begin with, and messing with their natural abilities might not be the smartest course of action. The best advice I ever got was from Hall of Fame instructor Bob Toski, who said to me, “Teaching great players is easy, just don’t screw them up.” Certainly, the golf swing has benefited from technology, but at what point does it become too much? Does it really matter if a player knows what synapses are firing or what muscles are connecting or how gravity plays a role during that one-second motion? It’s not complicated. Get the club squarely on the ball. How it is done can be very individual and unique. I wouldn’t begin to tell Jim Furyk or Lee Trevino or Miller Barber that they would become better players if they worked on stacking their weight more and improving their shaft lean. The golf swing is about execution under pressure. The method is not crucial; it is executing the method that is essential. That requires repetition, which tour players have been doing from a very early age. But even then, the best players screw up. They are not robots. There is a lot that goes into a shot – lie, wind conditions, ground condition, pin placement, and nerves. I don’t believe you can rely strictly on a single method for each shot. The other thing method instructors tend to say is that their method will produce solid shots all the time. I remember the headline on a Golf Digest cover with a tag line – “Hit every shot solid.” That is unrealistic unless Iron Byron is doing the swinging. Hogan said the secret is in the dirt, and although he claimed to have a specific move, he spent hours every day working on it, and still said he only hit about four perfect shots a round. Golf instructors will come and go as will players. Theories and terms will pop up and disappear. However, it always come down to the player’s talent and his work on the dirt.
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