Off-Season Series: Part II The Invisible Antenna
Working with young adults keeps you on your toes. The younger crowd consumes knowledge as fast as Pac-Man inhales little yellow dots. One can google just about anything in today’s world. Feed questions into Chat GPT, and it will spit out information in a split second. If you hope to connect with young people and speak their language, you better find ways to keep up.
A few months ago, I surveyed a group of students to see what their strengths and weaknesses were. I like to throw out broader questions at times, as it gives me a sense of their self-awareness. “I thought that’s not a thing anymore,” one of them said. “I thought it depended on the context.” We went on to have a lively discussion, and I made a mental note to look into the latest trends on the topic.
For those of you who are curious about what the experts say on the topic nowadays, I suggest you read up on articles by author and speaker Simon Sinek. To sum it up in my own words, he says what we consider to be strengths and weaknesses are highly situational. On a podcast I listened to, he shared that he is a chronically disorganized person and is prone to losing things. One day he meets a potential client at a conference, and they agree to connect shortly after. Simon misplaces his potential client’s business card but finds it two weeks later at the bottom of his bag. He rushes to email the potential client, thinking the delay might have put a damper on the start of their relationship. Instead, he later learns that his slow response made him seem more attractive to the client — it made him appear busier and more sought-after. An inadvertent advantage in this particular situation, but when it comes to space organization, not so much.
Reflecting on my own strengths as a golfer and the situations in which they shine, I credit my acute senses as a defining quality of my game. Feeling and visualizing shot shape, ball flight, gauging distance, and connecting to targets are some of my specialties. These skills lend themselves to different areas of the shortgame, in particular. Chipping and bunker shots eventually became the best parts of my game. As I step in to execute a chip or bunker shot, I feel confident that my approach is sound — that the club selection and landing spot chosen are appropriate given the distance, lie, grain, green speed, and slope. My feel-based analysis informs the set-up adjustments I would have made to ensure the best possible strike is achieved. To reach that end point, I would have visually assessed the variables mentioned (speed, slope, grain, etc.) and used my feel and visualization skills to double check that the chosen landing area is correct for my upcoming shot. The connection I feel to the landing spot towards the end of my pre-shot routine is as tangible as a physical object to me. The end result usually doesn’t disappoint, and even if it does, it doesn’t bother me as much as I know a miss is rare.
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The off-season is a wonderful time to fine-tune our feel—the invisible antenna of our golf games. Building and refining your feel will have tremendous benefits for your scoring skills. Some of my favorite exercises are as follows:
Eyes-closed practice swings: the purpose of practice swings is to dial in the feel and rehearse the motion for the upcoming shot. The practice swing is the coming attractions of the real thing. Closing your eyes and masking your ability to see forces you to call upon your sense of touch and sound. Start by doing practice swings next to the ball to see if you can replicate the strike you want. Rotate the focus areas for each practice swing by asking yourself the following questions: How well can you feel the club head brushing the grass? Does the length of your swing feel appropriate for the shot you’re attempting? Asking a coach to observe you or recording yourself can be very helpful too. Eventually work your way up to doing eyes-closed practice swings, then hitting a shot normally with your eyes open. After a few rounds of these, you might start to notice less of a difference between the feel of the practice swing and the actual shot. It can feel meditative after a while as well, and I bet it will sharpen your feel.
Ladders, a.k.a. snake drill: put down a stick or shaft at a certain distance, let’s say, 45 feet away from you. Chip or putt your first ball and try to get it to finish as close as possible to the shaft, but don’t hit the shaft or go beyond it. Your second ball should finish behind the first ball, and so on. Your goal is to fit in as many balls as possible between you and the shaft. If you happen to go past your previous ball, start over. By the way, it’s harder than it sounds. Setting a goal ahead of time for the number of balls to fit into the gap keeps it competitive, and you can also do it with a friend for a little more excitement.
One-handed drills - Tiger hits these right-hand only putts to warm up regularly. Watching the rhythm of his pure, one-handed putting stroke is like watching an artist paint. One-handed chipping is more difficult, but I’ve seen pros with the best chipping action do this with relative ease. While it’s harder for chipping, it’s a great way to test your strike and forces you to understand the feel that produces your cleanest strike. The goal of the one-handed drill is not to be perfect; being 50% successful is still very effective at producing the effects you want for sharpening your feel. The bonus benefits of this drill are many: it sharpens your proprioception by helping you sense where your body and club are in space. It also trains for resilience, as mishits may be plentiful in the beginning. If you want to be good at this game, you need to understand how to make the right mental and physical adjustments when the previous shot wasn’t ideal. The one-handed drill is a great drill for all of these reasons — it trains the club, body, and mind at the same time.
