We at the THSG hope everyone is well and healthy. THSG hope you have enjoyed your time back on the course after so many weeks away by hitting long straight drives and holing putts. We are sure that those practicing while away as not gone unnoticed by your fellow members and playing partners.
As we are sure you are all aware that competition golf is just around the corner. This can be an anxious time for some with having a scorecard in your hand, but we see this as an exciting time to challenge yourself with a scorecard in your hands and hopefully go some way in to helping you do this by achieving your goals and achieving your career best rounds.
Are you nervous when you have a scorecard in your hand?
Do you feel anxious on the first tee?
Do you change your thinking depending on your score?
Course Management can result in a huge difference in the way you score especially if you don’t have your “A game”. Zach has a few tips on how he has used course management to his advantage during his playing career when playing for his country or playing in international tournaments. Zach has used a more analytical approach in his course management to out-smart his opposition to win tournaments or to win matches when the opponent has had better physical attributes such as hitting it 50 yards past him in some cases.
Zach breaks down a course very similar to that of Seve Ballesteros in which he would look at match play as one hole at a time. This enabled him to focus on the task at hand and ultimately be one of the most successful match play players in history. Zach looks at a round of golf as 18 holes, which is 18 individual jobs at hand to combat. Focusing only on that one individual job and ticking that box off once you have successfully navigated it can be very beneficial when counting up your score at the end of the round.
Green - Tee Approach
One way to look at these individual jobs is to break down the hole even further. Zach looks at the hole and identifies that for example, par is the goal (no matter what level par is of great importance which we will discuss in future blogs). For us golfers to have the best chance of making a par, we must find the green in regulation (GIR). If we miss the green , PGA Tour average is 57% which shows that missing the green can limit our chance of making par. This is why we look at the green first and where do we want to place that ball on the green to give us the best chance of making par or better and the best chance to hit that green. Therefore it is vitally important to look at how are we going to hit the green and what is going to give us the best chance of hitting that green….. being in the fairway!
Playing from the fairway can be vitally important as this is when we have the most control of the golf ball in terms of strike, spin and consistency. If we hit it in the rough, we may have a poor lie and the lie may dictate the shot we can play and ultimate loose our control of the golf ball due to us not knowing how that ball will react when it leaves the club face.
Going back further to the tee. For us to have the best chance of hitting the green goes back to hitting the fairway off the tee and how we are going to that. Studies have shown that our longest drive is also our straightest! Therefore it is important to have full commitment in the club you use off the tee whether that is a Driver, fairway wood or iron and also our target off the tee to have the best chance of hitting our longest drive down the fairway.
This may be a different approach to one you utilise or have utilised in the past. I would experiment and try and practice this approach and see if it is for you.
One thing to add is that this can be incorporated to look at where we can error towards whether that be the left side of the fairway or green to give us the best chance of scoring our ball.
We will leave this here for you………. The more patient you are when it comes to course management by not trying to force the issue to try and get the ball close to the hole and make birdies, the less errors we will produce. The more often we think smart and play patiently the higher the percentage we will hit greens and get the ball closer to the hole……. and hole putts that we may not have expected to make!
THSG
