Rookie on the Green

Today was my first day ever to play in a golf league.  I had a great time but played a horrible round.  The ladies I was paired with were all very experienced golfers and were very gracious about my struggling, and gave me lots of good pointers.  For some reason, my drives, usually the strongest part of my game, were way off both in terms of direction and power.  But for a change, I made almost every short putt I attempted — that was a huge improvement.  The key was to focus on just barely tapping the ball as opposed to crushing it like I usually do (this is why my husband calls me Golfzilla when I putt).  Maybe I’m finally getting a feel for toning down the overenthusiastic putts.  I think this league play will improve my game a lot over the summer (and there’s a lot of room for improvement), so I’m glad I went for it.

I made it out to the range again today with high hopes for a nicer day since it was at least sunny.  The wind was still howling, though.  I was dressed like the Unabomber on the driving range — hood up, shades on, keeping out the wind any way possible.  My eyes are still watering.  The ball kept blowing around on the mat — it was hard to keep it still to hit it!  But I did get in some good chipping practice.  The chipping greens at Hiawatha are kind of protected by hills, so the wind wasn’t quite as bad.  I was impressed by the turnout on the course despite the cold and nasty wind.  Minnesotans are known for their hardiness, after all.  I sure hope the wind has died down by tomorrow, or we’re in for a long 18 holes during the first day of league play.

I headed to the golf course this afternoon for some quality time with putting and chipping, but the Minneapolis weather was anything but quality.  The wind was blowing so hard it nearly moved me during my setup — the balls I hit into the wind went nowhere!  And then it started to rain.  I got in one round of practice chip shots using my newly acquired Golftec chipping techniques and one round of putts.  Call me a fair weather golfer, but staying out there in the rain just wouldn’t have been productive.  Oh well, I gave it a try.  Tomorrow is supposed to be back up in the 60s, much better than today’s 46 degrees/ “feels like 38″ with 35 mph gusts.  I’ll head back to the range for practice under more conducive conditions.

I’m a very patient, laid-back person, but the guy we got paired with for 18 holes today got on even my nerves.  To set the stage, my husband and I were walking the course and this guy and his friend had a cart.

Things started off badly when on the first hole, the guy drove his cart right in front of us on the fairway as we were setting up to hit our second shots.  No amount of yelling could dissuade him, so we went for it and had to yell fore because he was sitting in the path of the ball in the cart.  It was pretty hard to understand why someone would do this, and he did it on just about every hole.  He was just oblivious, when common courtesy (and common sense) is not to stand in front of or park your cart in front of someone who’s hitting a shot.

The problem got worse and worse the more beer the guy drank (and he was the only one drinking). He also got slower and slower on his shots to the point that even though he had the cart and we were walking, we always ended up waiting on him — it got to the point he was really holding up the pace of play.

The most unfortunate side effect of all the beer was that the guy felt the need to relieve himself behind every tree (and on a fence, and even on the sidewalk next to a tee box).  It seemed like every time I looked up, he was doing it again.  Ay caramba!  That was downright disgusting.  I did everything in my power not to shake his hand at the end of the round, but somehow I was forced into it!  At least I gave him my glove hand…blechhh!!!  To top it all off, he kept on calling me “hon” and “honey” in a really obnoxious way throughout the round.

One kind of funny thing did happen, though.  I think even the guy’s friend was (FINALLY) starting to notice that the guy was really out of it.  On about my 5th shot on a par 4, I happened to land the ball in the hole from about 50 yards out (yes!).  The guy was convinced it was a hole in one and that if he signed the witness card I could get my name in the paper.  His friend had to yell at him for him to believe that this was not actually a hole in one.

Bottom line:  we would have had a much better outing without all the frustrations this guy brought on — it just wasn’t a pleasant time.  It was hard to focus and was just constantly aggravating.  Maybe we should have just let him and his friend play ahead of us to wash our hands of the bad apple.  The moral of the story:  please, please, please don’t be THAT GUY!

From the three rounds of golf I’ve played so far this season, one thing is evident:  I have no idea what the heck I’m doing when I chip.  I went to a Golftec lesson last week and asked to work on chipping to try to remedy this situation.   It turns out that my fundamental problem was the set-up — it’s very different from just a normal golf shot, and is a little counter-intuitive. It’s counter-intuitive because you’re getting lift on the ball by squeezing it between the club head and the ground, not by scooping it into the air.

Basically, my instructor got me on the right path with setting up to chip:  stance a little closer than usual (toes pointing maybe even a little bit left, towards the hole), ball farther back in the stance, not much of a back swing.  Your hands need to stay ahead of the club head, with the shaft of the club slanting with the grip towards the front of the swing and the head lagging behind (you can see this in the “after” photo, below right).  This is all for a short chip, say, just off the green.

This is a before-and-after of what’s going on with my chipping.  In the “before” on the left, you can see that my weight somehow ended up on my back foot when I hit the ball and the club head got ahead of my hands.  In the after, you can see that my hands led the club head through contact and my weight moved through to my front leg.

Another thing my instructor pointed out that seemed to help with my weight-shift issue was that my right shoulder should come up on the back swing and then go down noticeably as I move through to contact, as illustrated above.

I also learned that for the short little chips we were working on, the backswing should only go back to about waist high, with the club parallel to the ground, with wrists hinged back.  So the motion should be hinge back the wrists and then turn through to contact.  My instructor kept saying “hinge and turn, hinge and turn.”

One helpful Golftec drill I’ll be doing is a straight-arm chipping drill.  You keep your arms extended, totally straight, and don’t allow your hands or wrists to move during the chip shot.  The motion to impact should occur because of the rotation of your body, not wrist action.  This should be done with chips in the 15-yard range.

I have a long way to go before I can chip well consistently, but I’m going to set aside some time just for chipping practice because this is costing me so many strokes right now.

See my new post at Recipe Mashups on getting in shape for the season!  Golf is both a reason and a means for getting fit and healthy!

I was in my hometown of Las Cruces, New Mexico last week and my brother and I played the back nine at the New Mexico State University Golf Course, starting here at the Rich Beem tee at 10.  It couldn’t have been a more perfect day:  72 degrees with a cool breeze.  A far cry from the ice and snow of Minnesota.  My round started off with a small mishap, however, when I broke my sister-in-law’s driver at the driving range warming up.  I’m not sure what happened, but when I hit the ball, it sounded hollow.  I looked down and here’s what I found:

Oops.  And that wasn’t my only blooper.  NMSU’s course is a beautiful desert course and my ball managed to find a yucca.  I was looking around on the ground for my ball when someone in our group pointed out where it landed:

Here’s a closeup in case you can’t see where the ball ended up:

This was a fun nine holes despite (or maybe because of) these goofy incidents and the scenery was gorgeous.  Here’s a shot as the sun started going down, with the NMSU campus and Las Cruces in the background.

Today we headed out to the Braemar Golf Dome in Edina, MN, to get in some mid-winter practice.  This was the first time I’d hit balls in a dome before.  According to the website, Braemar’s dome is “the largest and longest-hitting in the Twin Cities area with 46 tee areas on two levels.”   The prices aren’t bad — $10.50 for a half hour on a tee with unlimited balls (that’s on weekends) and $7.50 per bucket during the week.  Two people can share a tee, so Matt and I alternated on one tee and it worked well to have short breaks between each hitting session.

It’s pretty close quarters on the tees.  You can’t take your golf bag in, so you have to just carry in the clubs you want to hit.  Definitely a great way to get some practice in while the weather outside is so nasty.  I’m sure we’ll go back quite a few times before spring arrives.  The picture’s a little blurry, but here I am hitting some balls.

Putting, Before and After

Well, this picture of my horrid “before” putting stance and much-improved “after” says it all. Nothing like seeing a picture of how badly you’re doing to knock some sense into you.

You can see in the “before” that my back is hunched over, my legs are bent too much, and my hands are nearly against my thighs.  Here’s what my instructor taught me to lead to the new, improved “after” photo:

1.  Hips over heels.  This fixed a lot of things, including having my hands too close to my legs and having bent legs and a hunched back.

2.  Eyes over ball.  With hips over heels, you bend at the waist instead of the knees to get your eyes directly above the ball.

3.  Ball forward of center in the stance.

4.  Knees not too bent.  Again, a function of hips over heels.

5.  Change grip to have left hand on the bottom for now. This kept my wrists from breaking through the putt, gave my wrists more stability and aligned my forearms closer to parallel with the club instead of at a sharper angle.  The left-hand-on-bottom grip was also simpler and felt more natural than the modified claw grip I’d tried out last fall.

Here are a couple of the GolfTec drills my instructor gave me to practice what I learned:

-Ladder drill.  Put a line of six golf balls going out from the hole in one-foot increments.  Take a practice swing before hitting each ball.  You can’t move on until you get the balls in consecutively.  For instance, if you get the first ball in, you can move to the second.  You can’t go to the third unless you get in the first and second on the first try, and so on.  Do the drill until you can go through five rotations, making every putt.

-Lag drill.  This drill helps you learn distance control for lag putts (long putts you don’t expect to make but hope to get close to the hole).  Put a club on the ground three feet behind the hole, perpendicular to the line of the putt, such that the club will stop the ball if you hit it too far.  Practice putting five balls each from 20, 30 and 40 feet.  You get no points if the ball hits the club or stops short of the hole.  You get one point if the ball goes into the hole or stops between the hole and the club.  Do the drill until you’re getting at least 12 of 15.

It’s been a long winter and we still have a few months left here in Minnesota!  In hopes of fooling myself into thinking golf weather will be here soon, I booked a few lessons at GolfTec in Edina to get my progress back on track before it’s time to get out on the course. One of the things I worked on in the lesson was shoulder turn and shoulder tilt on the backswing.

Shoulder Turn Before

My instructor used a photo of Michelle Wie to show me where I was going wrong in this before shot.  On the backswing, my shoulders weren’t “wound up” enough, not rotated far enough in the direction of the red arrow.  As you can see from the green arrows, my left shoulder lines up with the inside of my left leg, and Wie’s left shoulder is rotated to the point over her right, or back, leg.  You can also see the yellow “70″ shoulder turn number.  At GolfTec, green numbers are good, yellow numbers need work and red numbers are bad.  So that’s what we have to work with.

My instructor had me focus on getting my shoulder turn closer to Michelle Wie’s above.  Then I took a few practice swings with a Swingyde Golf Swing Training Aid, pictured above.  It was really amazing how this helped me get the feel for where everything should line up, both on the backswing and on the follow-through, without doing anything funky with my wrists.  In my swings after that, I tried to remember what it felt like with the Swingyde.  Maybe I need to get one of those things… it made a big difference.

Shoulder Turn Before and After

Here’s a look at before and after from the side — big improvement on the shoulder turn (nevermind that my head is turned to see what I did).  You might also notice that my hips turned too much, too though.  More on that coming up.

Here’s another before and after from the front.  The challenge through this process was that when I worked on getting my shoulders turned enough, my left shoulder wasn’t tilted low enough.  When I got the shoulder turn and tilt fixed, my hips rotated too much, as I pointed out before.  So the trick is to fix the shoulders and keep the lower body solid, and that’s going to take some practice.  Here are a couple of the drills my instructor gave me to work on this:

1.  Line Up the Clubs.  You need two golf clubs.  Get your feet like you’re setting up to hit the ball, in an athletic stance, shoulder width apart.  Put one club on the ground, shaft touching the inside of your back foot, pointing out in front of you (perpendicular to the target).  Take the other club and hold it straight across your chest with your arms crossed against your chest.  Rotate your shoulders to the right, as in a backswing, until the club at your chest is parallel to and directly above the club on the ground.  This helps get the shoulders rotated enough and helps you learn a good weight shift in your swing.

2.  Table Drill.  This one also works on weight shift, but also keeps your hip tilt from going too far.  You need a golf club and a table.  Stand with the table off your right hip.  Line up your feet as though at address.  Hold one end of the golf club in each hand with your arms extended about waist-high.  Rotate your upper body so that the club stays parallel to the floor and to the table, and clears the table.  You should feel the weight shift into the inside of your right leg on the backswing.

So, that’s what I’m working on this week.  My instructor left me with an after shot next to Stuart Appleby to show me the things I was doing right and for a little extra encouragement!  Hopefully I’ll get a chance to practice some of this stuff in a golf dome this weekend.