Entry 24.8

Ok here I go. Some of you are going to stop reading as soon as I make this highly controversial statement, and others will continue. I highly recommend reading this entire entry as while you may not agree with it 100%, you will still probably learn something and at the very least, see a different viewpoint than the one you currently hold. So here we go.

You are deliberately preventing yourself from reaching your potential with the statement “I am a feel player.” There it is. I know this may seem like I’ve already touched on this point once, but I’m going to touch on it again, because it is so important for you to understand. Being a feel player will only get you so far. It has limits. When I am told by a player that they are a feel player, the first thing I see is a wall. That player just purposefully threw up a blockade between him or herself and me. There is only so much that I can do for that player at that point. My job just become significantly harder because now I have to work on going over, around or through that wall to help that player. I want you to be a feel player. I don’t want to change that fact about you. Being a feel-based player is so important and is the key to high level performance. But feel is going to get you so far when you want to increase that performance. So here is another plea for you to be vulnerable and explore another side of performance enhancing instruction.

This is not a golf specific phenomenon. At the highest level of any sport, coaches and instructors are focusing on mechanics and data to drive performance. If you go to an NFL practice field, you will see coaches using three-dimensional motion capture to help quarterbacks with their throwing motion. Enter the MLB world and you will see the same thing going on. Pitching coaches have been working on improving players’ mechanics not just to help them throw harder but help them to throw it safer. Batting coaches are doing the same thing. Since we have seen the introduction of radar units into sports, we can now find them on baseball fields, football fields, tennis courts, the practice facilities at golf courses. Data is driving the sports world everywhere.

Just preparing for the NFL Combine is all about making your motion more efficient and getting stronger and faster to rank higher. One of the companies that players use is called Exos. Had the medical team in the Army been able to see a way for me to stay on active duty that was my next stop in my therapy. I have a couple ins besides being part of the special operations community. My trainer while I was in the Army was an employee of Exos. My dad knows, works out with and consults for the owner of the company. Day one at Exos involves a performance evaluation. Guess what? You walk in and say I’m a feel player and while they may not laugh at you, they immediately see their job helping you just got a lot harder. How do I know? I asked. They will then sit down with you and talk to you about how important it is to gather data on your current performance to help you improve. Go to their website and you will see the word data everywhere. One of my favorite lines on their website is “Numbers don’t lie.” I’ve had the opportunity to talk to, observe, listen to lectures by, being on calls with some of the top golf instructors in the United States. Guess what? They are ALL data driven. Not one will not gather hard intelligible data on you, the club, the ball, etc while they work with you. They will then use that data to help you drive your feels in the right direction to increase your playing performance.

Now I am not saying that you need to be worried about the numbers. In fact, unless your personality type says that you will perform better knowing the data, I highly encourage you not to focus on the numbers too much. But you should care about them. When I teach, I do my best to limit the number of numbers that I provide to the player. You all have taught me that. Just because I care about the numbers doesn’t mean that I have to be talking about them with you as the player constantly. What I do as is that players care about the numbers because they are the best way to interpret what you are doing. If my teaching bay was twice as deep, I would have all the screens turned in a way that you would never see them. All that data is there for me to worry about. But without them, I can’t interpret exactly what is going on. I can surmise, make educated guesses, and give plausible explanations, but I can’t tell you for sure what you are doing. And no player at your level should have a coach who is guessing. So, what numbers should you care about?

Let’s look at launch monitor data first. I want you to know your carry numbers with every club. Period. I really don’t care too much about total. You need to know your carry numbers so you can choose the right club and pair it with the right feel to give you that number. When you hear professional players and caddies talking about their “cover number”, they didn’t choose that number from feel. They chose it from data. The second number I want you to know about is spin. We just want to make sure that it doesn’t get out of control. Moving on. The final metric from a launch monitor I want you to know is the shape of your shot pattern and the radius of it for each club. This helps you choose the correct targets. All the other data from a launch monitor just leave to me or your coach.

What about on course data? How can we use this information to drive performance? Every time you play, I would want you to track certain data. Tell me where your ball ends up relative to your target and to the course. So, if you aimed down the middle of the fairway and it lands in the left rough, just mark that tee shot as “Center cut, Left Rough”. For approach shots, give me the distance to your target (not the flagstick unless that is your target), and where the ball lands relative to it. So short right, long center. Also tell me what club you hit. With this information we can see if you have certain trends going on. For any short game shot, give me distance to where you intend to stop the ball, what shot you hit and where the ball ended up relative to that intended stop point. 25’, low pitch, 2’ is good enough. Finally, for putts tell me distance to the hole and where the ball stopped relative to it at minimum. If you can include the break and uphill/downhill information that would be awesome as well (using TheStack putting, you can do this inside the app. My Coach’s code is 990851). I know it seems like a lot but the best part is, all you are doing is gathering the data. Then you drop it in my mailbox and I go through it. I record it, analyze it, and come back to you with ways to focus your practice. We could go into strokes gained statistics and maybe I will do an entry on that at some point, but we don’t have to have all that to help you perform better.

I am here to help you become a better golfer and I’m not here to tell you not to be a feel player. I highly recommend it in fact. But to make sure the feels are the correct ones, I must have data. So, please don’t throw up that wall. Doing so would be like a CEO of a Fortune 500 company saying he doesn’t want to know the numbers that the accountants and analysts are compiling. It just doesn’t make sense. You might be the CEO who doesn’t want to know the specific numbers just what the numbers say. Don’t be afraid of data but use it because it is powerful and using it correctly will let you continue to raise your performance by refining your feels. Play with feels based on data driven insights. Play without limits and see your performance increase little by little.