Think Your Way to Lower Scores

The winters here in Minnesota can get awfully long and cold and they leave the obsessed golfer with a lot of time to think about the game. This past winter, I had the chance to read a few great golf books that addressed course management and how to make better decisions on the course to lower your score. Some of it was pretty basic stuff like hitting to the fat part of the green instead of trying to go for a sucker pin guarded by bunkers, but other tips have already made a huge impact on my game this spring and were tips that I hadn't tried previously.

I'll summarize some of the most helpful tips below:

• On par 3's, when you're in between clubs, take the longer club and swing easier, don't take the shorter club and swing harder. As soon as I took this advice, I've started hitting the ball on the green more often and closer to the hole more often. This advice is especially helpful hitting into the wind since the softer swing with the lower lofted club generally will fly lower and will be affected less by the wind. Dont worry about what club your buddies hit. Just play your own game and enjoy your lower scores!


• Play the shot you know you can hit, not the one you hope you can hit! Can you really pull off the 200 yard carry over the water from a questionable lie? Play the percentages and lay up. I can't tell you how much playing conservatively has helped my score. Don't get me wrong, there are still times to play aggressively, but only when you're feeling confident that you can pull off the shot. This rule especially applies when you're in trouble, like when you're in the woods and trying to decide where to play the shot. Pick the shot you know you can pull off, even if you have to take your medicine and chip it out to the fairway.


• Chip and pitch with the shortest club you can (click the link for the article)
• Try your hardest on each shot but don't worry too much about the results. Think about what you want to accomplish on each shot and focus your attention on every shot but don't worry too much about the results. If you pick the smart play, assess the lie and the conditions and focus on the shot, that's all you can do. If you screw the shot up, just forget about it. It's not that big of a deal and getting angry about it can only make things worse, including your next shot, or shots! This is especially true for short putts, all you can do is read the putt, line it up and give it your best shot, if it doesn't go in, forget about it. If you need to practice something, work on it when you're not playing.
• Don't give up. Just because you hit a bad shot or two, keep your focus and grind it out until you get the ball into the hole. You might surprise yourself by saving a lot of strokes by not just giving up when you hit a bad shot or two on a hole. In other words, grinding will lower your scores!

Make the Short Game Easy

Golf is a tough game, and I’m sure we’ve all witnessed otherwise rational people reduced to cussing out inanimate objects in frustration while playing this great game. One of the most frustrating parts of the game though occurs around the green. You may hit two beautiful shots that cover 450 yards or more and then spend 4 more excruciating shots just trying to get the ball the last 20 or 30 yards into the hole. Talk about frustrating!

Most people understand the importance of a good short game, but they just don’t know how to improve. I see many players of all handicap ranges struggle around the greens and I think that it is because they are making the short game too hard on themselves! Part of the problem lies with watching the pros on TV and in golf magazines spinning lob wedges from anywhere to a foot from the pin. What people need to understand is that this is the pro’s full-time job and they spend countless hours practicing their short games.

For the average golfer that plays once or twice a week at most, the precision required to hit the shots that the pros hit is not practical. But there is some very good news here; you don’t need to hit those hard shots all the time! In fact, most of the time, just by changing the club you use on these shots, they become much easier! I can’t tell you how many people I see that use a sand wedge for all shots around the green, and more often than not, I see them blade it over the green or chunk it short of the green!

There is a better way!

In golf, the smaller swing is always easier to pull off than the bigger swing. Why take a big swing with a sand or lob wedge and try to fly the ball all the way to the hole when you’re just off the green with a ton of green to work with? Learn to use a less lofted club that allows you to take as small a swing possible and get the ball rolling to the hole as soon as possible. This is much easier, requires much less practice and your misses will end up much closer to the hole! Most importantly, your scores will go down!

For almost all shots around the green, I either use an 8 iron, pitching wedge, sand wedge or lob wedge, depending on the lie and how much green there is to work with. The club to pick is the one that will land 2-3 feet onto the green and roll the rest of the way to the hole. One rule of thumb I like to use for which club to use goes like this: On a flat lie, an 8 iron will fly ¼ of the way to the hole and roll the other ¾ of the way, a pitching wedge will fly 1/3 of the way and roll out 2/3 of the way to the hole. A sand wedge will fly ½ way to the hole and roll the other ½. Finally, a lob wedge will fly 2/3 of the way and roll the other 1/3 of the way. The important thing to note here is to take into account the slope of the green as a green that is sloped into you will roll much less than normal and a green sloped away from you will roll much more than normal.

Using a smaller swing on short shots makes the short game so much easier and more fun, and isn’t that the point of the game after all?

Wedges and the Yardage Gap

One of the biggest advantages I’ve found of the new yardage finding technologies (rangefinders and GPS units) is the ability for the average golfer to dial in their yardages for all clubs, especially on their wedges. In the past, the only way to really do this was to hope your course had accurate sprinkler yardages (but even this was flawed due to varying pin placements) or to pace off the yardages (and hope your steps were exactly a yard!).

This past weekend, I played a course with a great cart GPS system that had distances to the actual pin location. I decided to take advantage of this accuracy and technology to dial in the distances of my wedges. Whenever I had a fairly flat lie, with little or no wind and hit an “average” wedge shot with my 58°, 54° or 50° wedges, I would utilize the GPS and just pace off my distance from the hole to peg my actual distance with each club. Then I would write the yardage down on the back of the wedge head with a marker. (Note: expect a little ribbing from your playing companions when they see a “90” written on the back of your wedge!)

I was surprised in how much I learned by doing this and I think this exercise will help others as well. I learned that my 58° goes exactly 75 yards (I used to think it was somewhere between 65 and 85 yards), my 54° goes exactly 90 yards (I used to think the range was 85-100 yards) and probably the most educational part of this exercise was to learn that my 50° goes only 95 yards, only a 5 yard gap from my 54°!

I plan on making one major change due to this experience: I will either bend my 50° loft stronger until I reach 105 yards exactly or I will buy a new gap wedge that travels this distance. That way, I will have an exact 15 yard gap between my 58°, 54°, 50° and 47° pitching wedge (which travels 120 yards).

The two major takeaways I had from this were: 1. Don’t believe that consistent loft gaps between wedges will lead to consistent yardage gaps. 2. My yardage control with wedges improved immediately just by knowing these yardages instead of guessing.

How do you do this?
If you have a GPS that allows shot distance tracking (most do) or a rangefinder, you’re all set. If not, borrow one from a buddy. When you get up to a wedge shot in “perfect” conditions (flat lie, low wind), mark your distance to the flag with the rangefinder or mark your starting location with the GPS unit and then if you’re using the rangefinder just step off your yardage short of or past the pin to determine the actual distance or with the GPS just walk to the ball and find out how far it went. Then, just write it down (use a piece of paper if you don’t want to write on the wedge like I did). Soon enough, it will be committed to memory.

One should really do this exercise with all clubs, but I’ve found the most bang for the buck comes with the wedges. Perhaps it is because these are the clubs used most during the round, but I also think it is because these yardages are the least understood by most golfers.