Entry 25.37

Golf is such a misunderstood game. The biggest misunderstanding that I see? Thinking that having a “more consistent” or “more repeatable” swing will mean you will play better golf. This thought process seems so logical. If I hit the fairway or green more often, then my scores will be lower. However, the golf swing does not equal the game. It is just a very small part of the game. I don’t know how often this line of thinking is why a player says he or she is there to take a lesson, but I want to say more often than not. Then we do some 3D motion capture and/or video analysis. The result? Their swing is very repeatable. Very consistent. I’m talking down to within a couple of tenths of an inch of linear motion (sway, thrust and lift) or a few degrees of rotational motion (turn, bend and side bend). If we took a few swings and laid them over each other, it would look like there was only one swing happening with almost indistinguishable differences. I’m not talking about just some of the elite players I work with. I’m talking about all the players that I work with on the handicap spectrum: +7 all the way to 54. I had a player reach out today for help while on the golf course because he had the “heel shanks”. The problem? The video he sent me showed the ball clearly coming off the toe like the club was a croquet mallet. Your swing is more consistent than you think. Your ball flight may not be as consistent as you would like, but your motion is. There’s good news and bad news there. Which one do you want first? Let’s go with the good news. I like to find success first. That news is: mission accomplished. You have a consistent, repeatable golf swing. The bad news? The motion isn’t giving you the results that you want. Let’s sandwich that with some more good news. I can help you get to where you want to be. But that’s not the point of this entry. What I want to talk about is how we as a golf industry have failed the people we are trying to help become more invested in the game. Because honestly, it’s not their fault.

The ever growing, constantly evolving strain of golf killing information out there is the main reason that the average handicap hasn’t gone down in the last 40 years in my opinion. A Golf Digest article from 2024 shows that in 1983 the average handicap for men was 17 and for women it was 31.5 (https://www.golfdigest.com/story/golfers-average-handicaps-1984-2023-usga-handicap-archive). A United States Golf Association (USGA) handicap statistics through 31August2025 shows that the new male average is 14.2 and for females it is 28.7 (https://www.usga.org/content/usga/home-page/handicapping/world-handicap-system/whs-stats.html). That’s really not great at first look. Especially when we look at how much more scientific research has been completed on all areas of the game. But if we rearrange that information, we see men have reduced their average handicap 16.47% and women 8.89% (2.8 strokes lower for both men and women). As percentages those really aren’t terrible but says that we as an industry are failing women more than we are men. Part of that falls on course designers not making enough enough teeing areas at a playable distance for women. Part of it falls on the executive management of golf courses or country clubs for not catering to women more. Part of it falls on club manufacturers. When are we going to realize that we need to start making clubs more playable for ladies? I had a player yesterday in a lesson that seemed like she was really struggling to control the club due to the weight of it. Despite being a “ladies” club, when she handed me the club, it felt heavier than my club in my other hand (same iron. An eight). Like I wouldn’t want to play it because of how heavy it felt. That was just disappointing that companies think that is ok. My player and I had a conversation about the weight of her clubs and other options. But teachers are just as much to blame as the rest of the golf industry. A lot of the information comes from us.

For a teacher hungry to learn as much as they can about the golf swing, short game, putting, course analytics, and more, we are in an amazing age. There is so much information out there. Some of it new. Some of it old. Some of it right. And some of it wrong. As a teacher, it is easy to find the information, but hard to discern which of it to use and what to ignore. I haven’t taken a course on the golf swing from every possible source yet (not even close) but I’m working on it. I don’t know the exact number of certifications I have; I’d have to check my “I love me” book. Records get lost all the time in the Army so we had binders where we kept everything. That way if something ever went missing from your records you have a copy. They are known as “I love me books”. By the time I got out of the Army I was on my second 3-inch binder. I’ve done the same thing in the golf industry. I have one “I love me” book that has my PGA Portfolio in it and a second where I keep all my certificates. But let’s look at two of the big organizations that I have learned from: the Titleist Performance Institute and Stack&Tilt. If there are two organizations that butt heads about the golf swing, it’s those two. I attended an eight-hour seminar from each of them at the PGA Show this year. In both, the speaker spoke negatively about the other’s views. When I say “speaker” I mean the guy who started the organization. I honestly found it amusing. Because a vast majority of the information they each gave was the same. Not just slightly similar but exactly the same. But if you just watched their information on YouTube or Instagram you would think these guys are on completely polar opposite ends of the spectrum. And let’s face it, unless you are seeing a golf professional for instruction, that’s where a vast majority of players get their information.

Pick a golf topic you want to learn about, go to YouTube and just watch videos in order (as long as they aren’t all by the same person). After a few videos you should easily see what I am talking about. This guy will say to do one thing and in the next video you will hear the opposite. How are players supposed to know what to do? First off, go see a golf professional for your instruction. Not on a screen but in person. Yes, I am shamelessly making a plug for myself and my way of doing things. I help my players from time to time remotely, but I do my best not to. Not because I don’t currently charge people for remote instruction, but because it is not the most efficient way to learn. A lesson that a few of you have helped me to learn. The current culture of modern education (not just golf instruction, but all education) seems to believe that if learners are like buckets. We take a whole bunch of facts and pour them into your brain and voila! You have learned. Not the case at all. Especially when learning a physical skill like the golf swing. That’s just not how we learn. Those of you who have taken a language in school will know exactly what I’m saying. Most language teachers teach you words and then syntax and so forth. Except when you learned to speak your native tongue, that’s not how it happened. No one handed you a stack of flashcards with words on one side and the definition on the other. Over time as you experienced life you began to associate words with meaning. Then how to put ideas together. And then your parents began to regret their desire for you to start to talk. But that’s not a physical skill like the golf swing. But walking is. I use this example with my players all the time. Your parents didn’t give you step by step instructions. When I took my Foot/Ankle Specialization I learned a lot about the biomechanics of walking. If I went through all the steps (pun intended) of walking, it would probably blow your mind. But that’s how people expect you to learn the golf swing. Lots and lots of do this and do that. I am one of the guilty ones. It’s exactly how I taught. But when players struggle to remember all the instructions over and over, as a teacher you have to start scratching your head. The question is often “what is wrong with this player?” It’s way easier to blame the student. They are the problem. But the question that needs to be asked is “what am I doing wrong?” That’s a much harder question to ask.

Thankfully I have a bunch of great players who pointed me in the right direction. They didn’t want to know “stuff”. They didn’t want to know what they should be doing. They just wanted to do it. It wasn’t very long ago that I despised when players told me they were feel players. My answer? “Ok, you want to be an athlete. No duh. Tell me something helpful.” Little did I realize they were giving me the answer. They weren’t telling me how they played the game or swung the club. They were telling me how to best help them learn. They were pointing me to natural learning. That’s how you learned how to walk. You tried, made mistakes, fell on your head, cried and then did it all over again. Little by little you began to understand the feels that worked and what didn’t. You focused on those feels. And soon enough your parents began to regret their desire for you to walk. The problem with education these days is that adults forget how natural learning works. They sit you down in a desk and start to feed information to you. And the speed as which you learn actually goes down. We learn best and fastest from experience not from facts. Especially physical tasks. Because experience means we are feeling something. Once I finally asked the right question (again, “what am I doing wrong?"), I began to understand. I didn’t need to change your golf swing. I didn’t need to fix your mechanics. I needed to adjust your feels. You were telling me the answer all along and I was a total blockhead and wasn’t listening. I was doing what all the great teachers that I have observed and learned from taught me to do. Thankfully, my incessant need to continue to learn opened my mind and I finally figured it out. I recently watched a video of a lesson I gave a couple years ago to compare it to how I teach today. Woof. That version of me was an idiot. Really good at keeping players coming back and paying for more lessons. Really bad at helping people play better golf.

If a teacher can’t wade through all the information and figure out the right thing, how are players supposed to wade through all the information and figure out what they need to do to play better? I used to gobble it up when a player would come see me and talk about how they felt like their swing plane was off and how hand depth was to blame and yadda yadda. This player was ready to learn. If they didn’t talk like that, I had been taught to raise the level of their knowledge to my own so they could fix their swing. Pretty much what schools do. Raise your level of knowledge so you can be prepared to face life. Except that kind of education really doesn’t cut it. It isn’t until you get out on your own that you figure out that life is a lot different than you expected. You have to learn a lot of things that school did not teach you. Why I thought teaching that way was correct despite my life experience that said that’s not how real learning takes place I’ll never know. I’m an idiot. That I’m figuring out more and more. Now when a player comes into my bay and starts throwing out a bunch of fancy golf terms, I pay more attention to what is really been said and not just the words coming out of their mouth. Most of the time, they are actually saying “I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube and reading Golf Digest articles, and I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing.” Then I get to work. Not filling the player’s head with what to do, but trying to empty their mind. Taking away all the thoughts. Getting them to focus on the feels. Not easy to do. Feels are fickle. They change. They are also different for each of us. We all have different definitions. Feels are individual. So hard to communicate. Which is why I think teachers tend to stick to “do this, do that”. So much easier on the teacher. So much harder on the player. A big reason why golf is so misunderstood.