2013 U.S. Women's Open Sebonack Golf Club

What an amazing golf course.  Sebonack looks as if it has been there forever and it's hard to imagine it was opened in 2006. The design of Sebonack with the collarboration between Tom Doak and Jack Nicklaus was meant to combine the " Tom Doak look" with the really good strategy of Jack Nicklaus. They also wanted a golf course that is a lot of fun to play, doesn't torture the members, has good greens and resists scoring.  All of that with amazing views on 13 holes that are either on the water or have a water view.  One of the finest golf courses to hold a U.S. Women's Open and this week should be amazing.

Here are some pictures that show those great views and some of the undulating greens players will have to contend with this week.  The scores will all depend on the wind, how dry the greens get and where the USGA decides to put the pin positions. 

 

 

 

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Do You Play Golf or Golf Swing?

Do you practice pure mechanics or do you work on controlling distance, direction and trajectory in all the parts of your long game and short game? The ability to control your golf ball instead of worrying about perfect swing mechanics is what you should be focused on. Most players have become so mechanical that they are working solely on their golf swing on the course and can't score, and they never learn or practice shots they need on the golf course. For example, most of the time on the course it's rare to end up on a perfect yardage each time you are playing. How many times do you practice the shots that are less than a full yardage? Did you just practice it once or did you get good at it? Here is an example of a situation on the golf course maybe you have encountered. You hit a drive straight down the middle; it's a good golf shot, and you are happy. Then, the next drive was thin, low, didn't feel very solid but still went pretty straight and ended up about the same distance as the other drive and didn't cost you anything. If that happens a couple of times a round and doesn't cost you any strokes, does that mean you change your swing because the ball flight didn't look or feel perfect? Sure, we all want to hit every shot solid, but where do you draw the line on making a change to try to have a flawless golf swing or accept shots that don't look perfect and don't hurt your score.

As Jack Nicklaus said in his book My Story about Lee Trevino, "He discovered what worked best for him and stuck with it through hell and high water. He learned golf by instinct, mimicry, experience and hard work.  The key to Trevino was that he had the intelligence and strength of will not to abandon his own techniques for what so easily could have seemed more correct, better or orthodox ways of playing. He was quite smart and secure enough to put scores ahead of style."

Focus your practice on scoring. The ability to control your golf ball instead of worrying about perfect swing mechanics is what you should be focused on. Evaluate your game based on the trends you are seeing that are costing you shots. Put more time into controlling the golf ball by practicing distance, direction and trajectory. Spend the time that you do have to practice on strengthening the other parts of your game that are hurting your score.


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Golf Myths About Practice

What are some typical myths in golf that keep us from improving?  We have all heard over the years how we have to make our new swing changes become muscle memory.  Do muscles really have memory?  Does practice make perfect? Reps, Reps, Reps. Not all reps are created equal. There are so many ways technology is assisting in helping us learn the right cause and effect of errant shots. Is that enough? What makes a swing change last and how long should it really take to get it to where you can consistently take it out to the golf course? We need to bust the myths of what most players think they need to do to make a swing change.

First, there is no such thing as muscle memory. Muscles don't learn. It's really a motor program that you are creating through practice to produce a new habit. There is a big difference between learning an athletic skill and learning a piece of academic information.  An individual can learn to solve a problem in one day because this involves cognitive learning, not motor learning.  If a coach asks a student to do something different in their backswing that's a mechanical movement, turning a physical movement into a motor program that is stored and able to be called upon under pressure will require lots of repetitions.  Golfers do not want to hear that they have to perform these repetitions.  It's the brain that learns from biomechanics and the behavior of biomechanics. It's more about strengthening your brain and training your brain not your muscles. We all know that it doesn't do you much good to be great on the range, but when you get on the golf course, your game goes south.  The truth is that most golfers do not improve because they never fully learn what they were attempting in the first place. Maybe they tested it a few times, but they did not store it in the brain and make it a part of their motor programming.  They did't train and get feedback on the things they were working on until they fully learned it. They also mistakenly practice without doing their pre-shot routine: they hit shots from flat, perfect lies; they hit shots with the same club repeatedly, practice putting from the identical spot, use artificial aids to align the shot and most of the shots are without a specific target.  How is that in any way similar to what you do when you play?

 If this sounds like you, you need to change the things you are doing in your practice and make it like how you play.  That means you need to simulate the on-course conditions in your practice.  Let's taking pitching for example, when practicing pitching, you need to make sure you are practicing on lies that are similar to the golf course, change your lie and target on each shot so you are forced to make decisions about the shot and vary your strategy each time in addition to going through your pre-shot routine.  This is how you will make your practice more like how you play. When you practice this way and keep training and getting feedback until you fully learn the skills you are trying to improve, you will be on your way to successfully transferring those skills faster to the golf course.

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What's New in Golf Instruction for 2013?

GOLF COACHING:  Coaching golf is about much more than perfecting the swing. There are tour-tested, sport science-based strategies that coaches use to help tour players score at the highest level.  What the focus will be is differentiating coaching from teaching, practical applications of motor learning & motor performance, using feedback to accelerate learning all of which are used to help the best players perform under pressure.  Most amateurs are just concerned with changing their golf swing.  We need to make the shift from perfect technique to learning how to score.  How do you turn that knowledge about your swing as a habit so you can transfer it to the golf course. You need to be able to control the golf ball and have enough technique to hit different shots to get around a golf course. It doesn't make much sense to try and swing like Tiger, its not about getting your swing to look a certain way, how does that help if you don't have a technique that will help you score.  The constant fallacy is that the reason you shot a high score is because of some technical issue in your swing you need work out on the range.  This isn't necessarily the answer to why your score added up the way it did. What other skills in your game are lacking?  How often do you get up and down?  How many 3 putts did you have? Do you hit enough fairways? Its about putting the ball where you intend to put it and having practiced the skills to do so.

As an LPGA Tour Player, for me to compete every week against the best players in the world requires highly finely tuned skills in each area of my game and a precise practice routine to be able to take those skills and have them come out under tournament pressure on the golf course.  I had a team that I worked with of golf instructor, golf fitness professional and golf coach/psychologist. What most amateurs aren't aware of is that becoming a good scorer on the course requires training that is geared toward transferring skills to the course. This is much different than standing on the driving range hitting balls and changing swing thoughts on every ball.  There is no correlation to taking that out to the golf course.  Just because you did it on the range doesn't mean it will immediately work on the golf course. There is science based on this, and it is called motor learning and motor development.  You will begin to hear more about golf coaching now, finally, thanks to Dr. Rick Jensen and Henry Brunton.  I worked with Dr. Jensen starting in 1993, and he helped me successfully get onto the LPGA Tour and stay out there. He changed me from playing golf swing on the golf course and taught me how to score through getting out of being such a technical expert with my swing; we worked on all the skills of my game to tour level and managed my game on the golf course, through strategy, how I practiced simulating golf course conditions and shots I would face. We put pressure on my practice so it would be no different once the tournament came, I had prepared for that.  He currently has developed the Golf Coaching Track for Titleist Performance Institute (TPI) and now golf instruction can finally shift out of all mechanics and into how to get the ball in the hole and transfer the swing you are practicing on the range to the golf course. This is what golf coaching is about. It's a long term understanding that making a change in your technique requires different practice than just beating balls on the range.

 To be able to take it to the course and own it so it will hold up under pressure, there is more to it than understanding the cause for the problems in your swing and what to do to fix them.  Since golf is a motor skill and requires not only repetition to store the skill as a habit,  you must also practice it and have feedback from your coach, once you are training the skill with that feedback, then you need to expose it to different conditions to simulate those you would encounter on the golf course.  Can you perform successfully from all kinds of lies and conditions?  When you first attempt to do this, it will be difficult because it will take many repetitions to get rid of your old habit to develop the new skill enough to see it come out on the golf course.  This step will take some time and is where most golfers give up or switch to another thought because they don't think it is working.  That is why they never get any better, they abandon it before they have trained it well enough through all the conditions necessary. This is such and important part of skill development where if you continue to build that skill under these conditions, it will transfer to the golf course and if most amateurs understood this about how a golf skill is learned they wouldn't abandon it looking for the next quick fix. Once you have transferred it to the course, and you can draw upon it under pressure you know you have completely learned the skill.  This is the essence of golf coaching; you learn that quick fixes are an illusion, it takes time to master a skill and how to train it to hold up on the golf course; you will have the skills to play to your potential.


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Edel Custom Wedge Fitting

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How Edel Custom Putter Fitting Will Change Your Putting

The fastest way to lower your handicap is to shave strokes on the green. Amid all the new irons and drivers and their promise of 280+yard drives, be aware that putting has become increasingly high tech as well. Golfers take the time and trouble to get their woods and irons fitted but then overlook the putter, which is, after all, what they use most. There are so many variables to a putter’s performance that it doesn’t make sense not have a putter that is properly fit for you. Through years of research, Edel golf has come up with some answers as to why those putters in your garage haven't worked.  Here are some of the many ways that technology can help with putting. 

How do you aim based on your perception? Our eyes all perceive shapes differently, each golfer relies on his or her eyes to set up a putt, and according to research most people—even PGA Tour players—have imperfect visual aim. The trick is finding the putter geometry that works the way you see things and putting technology will help you by fitting you to aim straight. That’s right, it is the arrow.  How many of you have bought your putter simply by how much you like the way it looks? How does a putter that looks good to you help you when it comes to aim and speed control?  What about the length, loft and lie?  Even if you have accommodated for those things and think you have the right lie and length for your putter, is that enough? 

Aiming correctly affects not only direction but speed as well.   Aim bias creates path bias, face rotation problems and affects speed patterns to get to different lines when not aimed properly.  In addition, Edel golf has indicated, the way you aim your putter can be affected by the shape of the head of your putter, the hosel, the lie angle, loft, whether there are lines on it or not, the length and the grip type.  These elements affect whether you aim left or right and deloft or add loft to your putter.  

Another important aspect of putting that you can be fitted for is speed control. According to Edel Golf research,” when it comes to fine tuning your speed control, there are putter design variables to manipulate the weight of the putter.  Lay a string on the green from 10 feet, when you putt to it, if you hit most of your putts beyond the string; your putter is too light. You are moving it too fast because your hands sense the lack of weight.  If the majority of your putts stop short of the string, then your putter is too heavy. You are moving it too slowly because your hands sense too much weight. Remember your high school physics; velocity has a greater effect on energy than mass. So that is why you should be using a heavier-weight putter on fast greens and a lighter-weight one on slow greens. Then it becomes a question of where you need the weight in your putter based on your stroke. Some players need the weight in the head, which aids on faster greens and changes the sound and perceived feel of the putter at impact, some need counter weighting which helps soften your hands and reduces swing weight and some need internal shaft weighting which is similar to counter weighting and changes the way the putter reacts in your hands and can enhance the feel of a straight-back-and-through stroke.   With the right combination of design elements, you will have a putter fit for you to get the right speed and direction every time. 


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