I took a lesson last Wednesday with the PGA certified instructor at Woodcrest. I start by hitting some balls that he’s recording and after 5 minutes he looks at 3 components of contact, power, and flight. He said I thin too many shots, my power isn’t an issue, and the consistency of flight is bad duck hooks which was all relatively true. He showed me how to lengthen my backswing which we worked on for about 10 minutes and that wasn’t difficult to improve. Then he tried to get me to hit the ground first and follow through without breaking my wrists which “he couldn’t even bear to watch” on my current follow through. This part of the these drills proved much tougher as I had developed a swing which wasn’t easy to fix. We then went out to the range to work on that same issue and I struggled again. Hitting the ground first was hard enough without having to worry about the follow through which I’d never been taught how to do. After some practice, I managed to start making some decent contact and the ball flight was noticeably different. It was still hard for me to understand and to execute, but I had some concepts to work on.
I played last Thursday at Seaview’s Pines course and had no clue how the lesson was going to affect my score. I start off on 1 hitting a hooking 4 wood in the trees but got a fortuitous bounce and parred the hole. Then I hooked another 4 wood into a trap (still in play) and managed to make another par on 2. On the next par 3 I put the ball on the green with another par. I ended making par on 5 of the first 6 holes (the par 3’s were moved up so it wasn’t totally legit). On hole 7 I hit a great drive and then had my first misfortune of hitting the ball out of bounds on a wide open club face. I managed to make triple, doubled 8, and bogeyed 9 for a 43 front.
We played the back through the rain and my contact was solid through the entire 9 where I got up and down a few times to save par and hit some outstanding drives on 17 and 18 which were tough holes to go +1 on them. I finished with a 41 and 84 for the round. You can see by the scorecard that it wasn’t the hardest course (70.1/120), but the greens were fast, and I had almost zero miss hits aside from the OB ball. Money well spent on the lesson and I’m looking forward to this season.
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