Member Success Stories and Profiles Sought
Editorial – Members Weigh In on Teacher Honestly
Same Struggles For PGA Tour Players
The common perception, and common sense, frankly, is that the players we marvel at on television each week have this golf thing all figured out. Yes, they hit the ball different than everyone else. If you stood in close proximity to the top players in the world, it looks different, sounds different and appears to be a different game than we play. When attending a tour event in person, I am often reminded of the Bobby Jones quote after observing a young Jack Nicklaus: “He plays a game for which I am not familiar.” But believe it or not, tour players struggle with the same mental issues that average golfers, new golfers and your students do.
Recently, I was fortunate to spend a couple of days listening to several instructors that can boast a long list of famous, modern-day tour players on their resumes. One of the striking points they all made was how human and normal these “gods of golf’ are.
The names herein will be protected, but every story, with names, that was relayed to the audience was funny but calming. Calming because it is a comforting feeling to know that the 25-handicap student I had 10 years ago is really not that much different mentally than these millionaire golf professionals.
Have you ever had a student or friend struggle mightily with putting during a round, (meaning several three-putts and very few made outside six feet), yet wants to go to the range right away and hit his driver? Well, according to the tour gurus, many tour players fall to that same bad temptation. The point is, they sometimes they have no clue where their strokes go. Like the rest the of us, they might be so upset about that one bad tee shot that they cannot think of anything else. The subject of this recent tale hit 13 of 14 fairways that day!
Another classic example is the tour player warming up before the fourth round of a tournament. He is leading the tournament. As he is striping great shot after great shot, he turns to his instructor with an amazing query. Believe it or not, he was worried about his swing mechanics before the round and was contemplating a change – to the shock and disbelief of his instructor. After a reassuring lecture that they should just keep doing what they had been doing the last three days, the player relented and did not follow through with a swing change that day.
A favorite student type of mine, tongue in cheek, is the “rabbit ear” student. Amazingly, many tour players suffer from the same exact syndrome. This is one of the most difficult things to grasp for me, but I have had many famous instructors over the years relay their long-eared tour player horror stories. Can you imagine your income and career relying on how this player performs, yet he is listening to everyone and their brother on what he should change in his golf game?
A frustration that all golf instructors share is that your students often get sidetracked with bad advice or bad self-advice, lose all confidence in themselves and just honestly have brain cramps that you find hard to believe. The afflictions of the mind that can derail the progress of your students are as normal and common as the sky and the sun.
Next time you get frustrated by your student’s mental pitfalls, take heed. It is the same feeling you share with the most famous of instructors working with the most famous of players.
A Strong Grip = Slicing… And Other Teaching Paradoxes
When I’m not executing my duties for the USGTF, I spend my time teaching this great game that we all love. The other day, a student came to me, saying he was hitting his driver all over the lot, but he especially struggled with a slice. It didn’t take but one swing to easily see what his problem was: He was slicing the ball because he had a very strong grip.
Wait a minute, you might say. What do you mean he was slicing because he had a strong grip? Everyone knows a strong grip leads to hooking the ball!
In most cases that would be true. But there are those golfers who use strong grips and almost never hook or draw the ball, and struggle with slicing. These players tend to be good athletes with decent motions. They can kinesthetically sense that any sort of release with the grip they have could lead to a drastic hook, so they have learned to block their release and prevent the ball from hooking, or even drawing.
Examples in professional that come quickly to mind would be David Duval and Paul Azinger. Both employed a very strong grip with closed clubfaces at the top of their backswings. And interestingly, both faded the ball. They used a fast body rotation throughout the forward swing and a holding off of the release to do so, because a normal release would result in a severe hook. Even a nominal release would result in timing issues, so a fade works best with extremely strong grips.
Players like Duval and Azinger were talented enough, and put enough practice in, that they were able to reach the pinnacle of the game as major champions. But my recent student, while a good athlete, was of course nowhere in their league. While he had enough kinesthetic intelligence to hold off his release to prevent a hook, occasionally he couldn’t hold the release off, and a drastic hook would result. The cure was to give him a neutral grip and get him to release the club fearlessly. He did hit a number of good shots, but I stressed that the changes I was asking him to make were not quick fixes, and would take several weeks, if not months, before he saw some consistency.
That led me to thinking about other teaching paradoxes. Here’s a brief list:
A faster backswing is better than a slow one.
We often hear our students say they “swung too fast.” As noted teacher Hank Haney likes to point out when he hears this, “What? You want to hit the ball shorter?” But often the student is referring to his backswing. And a lot of teachers buy into the “slower backswing is better” school of thought. Infact, studies show that most amateurs actually swing back slower than do the pros, and often considerably slower. A faster backswing has more stability than a slow one – think of a gyroscope. The swing should not be jerked back in order to become faster, but a smooth, quicker backswing can help many players.
A closed stance can lead to slicing.
When I first started teaching, I believed that slicers inevitably had an open stance in order to compensate for their slice. I was also taught that an open stance promoted a swing path to the left of the intended target line for a right-handed player. You also saw this belief printed in the pages of all the golf magazines.
However, when I started teaching, I quickly noted that about half of my slicing students had a closed stance. These golfers often have great backswings as they follow their stance line, but they re-route the club in an over-the-top move to start the downswing. The result is that while they are now swinging towards the target, as they should and as they are attempting to do, they are also swinging outside-in in relation to their alignment. Thus, a slice is born.
In the same family of alignment errors, you also will see some good golfers fight a hook from an open stance because they are swinging towards the target, resulting in an inside-out swing path through impact.
Better mechanics may lead to poorer results.
Golfers with certain swing errors may have their compensations grooved so deeply that fixing the main fault may make them worse, because they are unable to rid themselves of these deeply-embedded compensations. This can be a real problem for the teacher, but one way I’ve found my way around it is to observe what they do on a good shot vs. what they do on a bad shot, and reinforce the behavior that produced the good shot.
A longer club may produce shorter shots.
In the early 1990s, I saw an article that said if a golfer could not hit their driver more than 150 yards, they would actually hit the ball farther if they used a 3-wood. Although I had a hard time believing this, I reasoned then that if this indeed was true, it must be because the golfer didn’t hit the ball hard enough to let the aerodynamics of the ball kick in. With today’s knowledge gleaned from launch monitors and a better understanding of the science behind this, we can see that my rudimentary explanation back then is actually pretty sound today.
I learned in my college physics classes that a projectile launched at 45° would produce the greatest distance. But in golf, when we introduce the concept of lift due to a spinning ball, the optimal launch angle for maximum distance depends on the ball’s initial velocity and amount of spin. In general, a golfer with lower ball speed will need to launch the ball fairly high to achieve maximum distance, while a golfer with faster ball speed will likely need to launch it somewhat lower.
So when your short-hitting students say they hit their 7-iron farther than they hit their 5-iron, believe them. No amount of instruction will overcome this fact of physics. They can probably benefit from adding hybrid clubs to their bag, clubs with lower and deeper centers of gravity, to help them launch the ball higher. A 3-wood may be virtually useless off the ground, so a 5-, 7-, or even a 9-wood can be a better option.
In conclusion, we can see that not all golf instruction tenets are cut and dry. Conventional wisdom can only take us so far, and when it doesn’t apply, we have to have the knowledge and be creative enough to handle the curve balls that some students will throw in our direction.
Components of Solid Ball Striking
Great ball strikers all have something in common. They consistently achieve five factors at impact in relation to the intended target line. I abbreviate “intended target line” as ITL. The ITL is the benchmark target the golfer is trying reach starting at impact.
The five human performance factors at impact are: 1) clubface position to the ITL, 2) club path to the ITL, 3) centeredness of contact, 4) angle of approach, and 5) clubhead speed. All great ball strikers achieve a high level of each of these components. However, two really stand out, clubface position and centeredness of contact. If one does not strike the ball with the center of gravity or sweet spot of the golf club, there can be other influences on the ball flight.
One such factor that can influence the ball flight is the gear effect. The gear effect has influence on the spin axis. To understand this, you must understand some basic principles. All golf shots have backspin, not sidespin. To be simple, imagine a golf ball in the air with wings on each side. When the “wings” are horizontal, the ball flight will not curve. If the “wings” tilt down left, the ball flight will curve left. If the “wings” tilt down right, the ball flight will curve right. Again remember, all shots have backspin rotating on a center axis. The ball flight curvature is just a tilted axis.
Therefore, a golf shot stuck on the sweet spot is influenced by the face and path at impact. A simple phrase I use: clubface sends it, swing path bends it. The combination of the face and path at impact determine the ball flight. However, when the ball is struck off center, the gear effect also becomes a factor. A ball struck towards the heel of the club or the toe of the club imparts more influence on the spin axis. For a right-handed golfer, a heel strike has more right-biased spin axis, and a toe strike has more left-biased spin axis. This becomes more influential with clubs like the driver and fairway woods because the center of gravity is further back. The gear effect is more pronounced on these types of clubs.
The last two human performance factors at impact are angle of approach (or attack) and clubhead speed. The angle of approach can dramatically affect the club path and clubface position. A simple thing as a change in the angle of attack can impact dynamics for better or for worse. This gets into a discussion of the D-Plane, which I will leave for another article. Lastly, the clubhead speed at impact has obvious influence on the ball flight. However, notice I put it intentionally last. Speed is important but is the least important of this group.
As teachers, remember this tip: The easiest impact factors to change are clubface position, centeredness of contact, and angle of attack. A person’s ability to increase speed may be limited, and their overall swing direction is probably already ingrained. However, a simple change in ball position could completely change a person’s clubface position, centeredness of contact, and angle of approach at impact. Changing the angle of approach can change the club path at impact to the ITL – all of this without ever changing the golfer’s overall swing direction. Remember at impact, the club face sends it; the swing path bends it!
Teaching Outside the Box
As often happens in other sports or even walks of life, humans tend to naturally repeat behaviors or actions they see at a young age. Far too often, we accept the “way it’s always been done” as our excuse for continuing to do things the same way we have experienced it or seen it done.
As this relates to golf, and more specifically golf instruction, we should ask ourselves why the average lesson looks basically the same today as it did in 1950: Pile of balls, a set amount of time, teacher one-on-one with a golfer hoping to improve, or at least enjoy the game more. For the most part, it is like getting your haircut or getting a manicure. Granted, we do have more technology and more crazy devices than our golf teaching ancestors did, yet essentially, we have just accepted that the 30- to 45-minute lesson on the range is the way you do it. Why do it differently than it has always been done?
If we are truly honest with ourselves, it is just easier to follow the herd. Yet, we see professors and successful instructors in our schools and universities changing and evolving instruction every day. Go into an accomplished teacher’s classroom today and you may not recognize it is school! Your first reaction is to think, what is wrong with the way I learned English or math, a book, a teacher talking at me and me learning verbally? My answer is a lot iswrong with that! People learn all sorts of ways, and golf instructors need to recognize that.
Golf has a history of being behind the times in many aspects. I often like to joke that in golf we are now at about 1980. As an example, we see the USGA and the R&A contemplating big rules changes today, which is very refreshing.
It is important that instruction continues to improve and develop. Challenge old teaching techniques and ideas. That should be your objective as an instructor. How can I reach and assist more students? How can I get them to be excited about learning? How can I improve the experience?
We often think of technique expertise when we imagine what the substance of a good lesson is. And that is valid. But the structure of the lesson, the environment, the adaptive teaching style to the student is just as important. Contemplate your lessons and think outside the box. Help move golf forward into the 21stcentury. After all, we are 18 years in already.
Supervised Practice Times:
Post the times that your paying clients can practice with your supervision. Maybe it’s 6-7p.m., three days a week. Whatever works. Charge a small fee if you feel the need. You are verifying how and what they should be practicing, not giving a personal lesson.
Begin a once- or twice-a-month play league with your paying clients:
Create competition, which will allow you to observe them in a playing setting. That alone will help you tremendously as an instructor if your goal is to help them improve. Nothing brings out “real” like some competition. Plus, they have a great time.
Short Game Competitions:
Use your imagination and set up games, leagues, etc., around the short game for your regular clients. Give away free lessons if they bring a friend. Maybe even putting leagues and challenges. Everyone loves to putt, and you could video their technique under pressure to sell more putting lessons.
Playing the Game Observations:
For beginners or curious golfers, create a once-or twice-a-month follow-along, with the teacher actively on the golf course. They come out to watch you play as you explain the basics of the game for two or three holes. Bring your favorite student along who will help you and be your best advocate. They learn more about what the game is all about, and you create new students.
From these ideas, you get the point. The possibilities are endless. Supervised practice is a great way to help them and to create loyalty with your students. Just use your imagination and remember it is not 1950.
Balls
I am a casual golfer. I was a 10 handicap at one time, but now am a lot older, creakier and crankier; the handicap is now a multiple of what it once was. As I have mentioned before, I have been teaching skiing for 50 years (some of those years with your esteemed USGTF president). I take golf lessons and really enjoy not only fixing my swing, for at least a short period of time, but discussing the nitty-gritty of teaching and how to be most effective in helping people improve. I read too many golf magazine articles and access too many golf tips on the internet. I have to take a break once in a while and “smell the flowers.”
I also have to confess…I am a bit of a golf ball hound. The resort course my wife and I are members at here in British Columbia, has a lot of knee-high grass next to many of the fairways that would please the eye of any hay farmer. Where there aren’t hay fields, the fairways are surrounded by park like wild lands of trees and shrubs. I have been intimately involved with just about every aspect of this wonderful off-fairways nature offering. When I am having one of those handicap-altering days and am asked, “How was it?” my answer is in the positive: “I had a great day. Lost 12 balls but found 15!”
So, I collect these golf balls and wonder what story each one has to tell. When I need a brain break, I quite often wonder into the tall grass areas near the first tee of one of our resort’s courses. There are always golf balls to be found there, and in great numbers. Golfers, especially out-of-town visitors, are more prone to “first-tee jitters” than regular members. They grip the club too hard, swing too fast, rip it off the top, have 10 too many swing thoughts, and the ball is into the grasses. Do they go looking for it? Most times not as the grass is thick, too far from the cart path, and their buddies have just picked themselves up off the tee box from laughing and loudly telling their friend his “skirt got in the way.” Or, the golfer took a mulligan, the second ball hit the fairway and his playing partners have moved on and are not about to wait for him.
Most of the balls I find off that first tee are brand new. Who would think of not using a new ball to start a golf outing? Many have corporate logos on them. I don’t feel bad pocketing these items as they are usually from a tire company, a car company, an insurance company, etc., where I have spent heaps of money. They didn’t give me any FS (free stuff), so when I pick up the ball, I feel like it belongs to me as I have already paid for it!
Then the wondering sets in. This ball is way off-line. Was it a left-handed golfer slicing, or did that right-handed golfer absolutely yank it? How hard did they swing and how disappointed were they right off the first tee? How was the rest of their day? Was this ball – 50 feet off the tee and 50 feet right – from the cigar-puffing chubby chap with the bad shorts and socks pulled up too high I saw on the driving range? And whom I heard talking about the “Titleest schwag” he got instead of “Titleist corporate gifts”? Or this pink ball 280 yards out and 30 yards right? Did a lady golfer actually hit it that far, or was it one of those NHL hockey lads at the course today that had run out of ammunition or had lost a bet?
There is a member at our club who has had to stop playing golf due to a debilitating illness. His only physical attachment to the golf course is when his wife takes him out in the quiet evenings and they look for golf balls near the fairways. The word is he has found some thousand golf balls. Therapy for him.
As a golf teaching pro, your students may need some therapy time. Suggest that the next time they hit it off-line they should spend a few minutes to find the ball. Chances are they will find two more and know that the people leaving them behind were having a worse day than they were!
Education Of A Golf Teacher
By Mark Harman USGTF Course Director, Ridgeland, South Carolina
What does it take to become an excellent golf teaching professional? Certainly, there are a number of aspects that come into play, among them playing skill, a desire to learn and help others, and a motivation to become the best one can be at this craft.
USGTF Master Teaching Professional David Vaught from Vista, California, one of the most respected members in our organization, has stated that one of his main motivations for being the best he can be is the desire to never give a bad lesson. In talking with David, you get the sense that he takes what he does for a living very seriously, and it comes through in his interactions with his students. He is undoubtedly one of the most knowledgeable people in regard to golf and the teaching of the game that I have come across.
Another professional who I have always been highly impressed with is CGTF professional David Hill from Montreal, Quebec, Canada. When I hear him speak about the mechanics of the game and its techniques, it’s clear that he has a knowledge well above and beyond that of a large majority of teaching pros whom I’ve encountered. I know how rigorously he has studied the game over the years, which is probably the key to his success.
For me, I started teaching the game in my mid-20s, and although I had a good grasp on the mechanics and some basic cause and effect, I had no practical knowledge teaching the game, save for helping out acquaintances and my college team-mates. I was tasked with instructing beginners, an excellent way for someone to get their feet wet in teaching if they have no formal training. In addition, I had a whole stable of talented and experienced golf teaching professionals from whom I could ask advice, and I wasn’t shy with my myriad of questions.
Still, it took me a couple of years to become what I would consider competent on the lesson tee. I still use a lot of the knowledge today that these fine teachers imparted to me many years ago, but learning to teach golf in this manner is somewhat of a random crapshoot. Had my fellow teachers not been competent, or had they unconventional ideas that didn’t stand up to logical scrutiny, I might have been forced out of the profession long ago.
After these couple of years I mentioned earlier, it became clear to me that there were several basic teaching concepts that presented themselves over and over in every lesson, which is where the USGTF comes into the picture. At the time, the USGTF was rapidly growing beyond what had been initially foreseen, and more golf teachers were needed for the examining staff. Fortunately, I was recommended and my career with the USGTF started in April 1991 at Lehigh Acres, Florida.
The USGTF was unique in that it welcomed all who were competent and confident enough in themselves, instead of requiring an apprenticeship of several years that had little, if anything, to do with teaching. It also for the first time put together a structured program that featured these teaching concepts that took me several years and hundreds of hours of lessons to learn on my own, but in fact could be taught in a matter of days.
As my journey as a USGTF professional continued, I realized I had an obligation to learn as much as I could about various teaching techniques and the methodologies of leading instructors. Nothing was off the table: From full-swing mechanics to short-game skills, from the mental game to motor learning, I knew I had to make an effort to become not just competent, but as good as I could become. It also required me to closely study new schools of thought and not to get entrenched in long-held beliefs that may or may not have been valid.
It also required me to learn something from each and every lesson. Sometimes these takeaways were, and still are, harsh. There are times where I have been utterly unable to help a student, de-spite my best efforts. It is after these lessons that I often wonder what I could have done to better get through to them, to get them to understand how to translate my words, pictures and drills into a feel they could kinesthetically comprehend. I wonder where I went wrong and if there was something I could have done to save the lesson.
Then I remember that no less than David Lead-better and USGTF member Bob Toski, two of the most revered names in teaching history, have ad-mitted publicly that there are times that they, too, have been unable to help certain students for what-ever reason. So I figure if it happens to the best of us, it probably happens to all of us, regardless of our skill or experience.
I remember the late Julius Richardson, the US-GTF’s Teacher of the 20th Century, giving a lady a brief lesson. I mentally went through her mechanical faults as I was watching this and wondered what he would address first. Much to my surprise, he told the lady to relax her shoulders at address. What? That’s it? Certainly that can’t be right, Julius, come on! What about her grip, her backswing and forward swing?
But you know what happened? That lady smacked the heck out of that next ball she hit, and she was so excited. She repeatedly hit shot after shot in a similar manner, and afterwards gave Julius a big hug.
What exactly he saw, I’m still not sure to this day. But it certainly taught me that a rigid way of thinking when it comes to teaching golf is a good way to find little success. And that might be the most valuable lesson I’ve ever learned as a teacher myself.
The Wisdom of Johnny O
Over the years, as in all walks of life, a wonderful cast of characters has inhabited the USGTF, from both the examining side and the candidate side. These people make indelible impressions on all of us with their uniqueness which makes the fabric of our lives all the more colorful.
One such great character was the late USGTF examiner John Nichols, or “Johnny O” to his friends. He always had a positive outlook on life, upbeat even when adversity might defeat a lesser person. His passion for the game of golf was second to none, and he sought to influence each person he met with that same passion.
John passed away much too young in October 1994 at the age of 47, but for those of us at the USGTF, he will always be remembered. He was an excellent player, having played the Tour in the early 1980s, and had some insightful bits of wisdom that are being shared in writing here for the first time.
Course management – “Make your mistake on the green”
John liked to say this to anyone who failed to get a pitch shot or chip shot on the green. What he meant by this is that if you have a tough up-and-down and your chances of getting up-and-down aren’t that great, make sure the second shot that might not go in is a missed putt (a mistake on the green) and not another missed chip or pitch shot. In other words, get that pitch shot or chip on the green and make sure you have a putt, even if it’s a lengthy one.
John reasoned that it’s easier to make a longer putt than a shorter pitch or chip, so it’s imperative that the second shot for the up-and-down be a putt. How many times have we seen golfers – whether the general public, our students or even ourselves – get too “cute” and try to get a tough pitch shot close to the hole? More often than we care to speculate, such a shot attempt leaves us with another pitch or chip, and sometimes in a worse situation than the original shot left us.
Hit shots with the right hand only
Every now and then, just for fun, John played one-handed using his right hand only. John was remarkably proficient with this method, often making pars and still able to shoot in the 40s for nine holes.
He pointed out that people who come over-the-top are only able to do so because both hands are on the club. If you swing with the right-hand only (for right-handed players), coming over-the-top is virtually impossible. It also teaches the golfer the proper wrist action and late release that so many golfers struggle with.
Swinging with the right hand only produces other benefits. In order to strike the ball cleanly, the golfer must complete his swing to the follow-through. It also teaches the proper clubhead-to-ball relationship at impact. Finally, it helps people learn the proper downswing sequence of lower body, upper body, and arms and hands, because it’s very difficult to swing this way with the arm and hand leading the downswing, as people are able to do with both hands on the club.
Toe the club in for pitch shots from thick rough
Thick rough around the green is a difficult challenge for most players, especially for those who play out of Bermuda grass in the South or in tropical climates. John was okay with the traditional methods of playing this shot, either like a sand explosion shot (where the clubface was opened) or with a square face and a steep angle of descent, but he had a different way of handling this situation. John recommended toeing the club in so that the clubface was closed at a 45° angle, and then taking a normal chip shot swing. By having the toe lead the clubhead into the ball, it would cut through the grass with less resistance. The grass would also open the clubface up to a certain degree, so the golfer doesn’t need to aim farther right to compensate. This shot does take practice, but once you get the hang of it, you might find it ridiculously easy to get the ball fairly close to the hole.
Johnny O’s legacy lives on within the halls of the USGTF and the golfing world. In fact, it’s safe to say that it also lives on in the games of today’s students, because long-timers on the USGTF examining staff are still using his inspiration – and instruction – to influence and teach our current generation of teachers and golfers alike.