During the summer of 2019, I was playing golf with my dad. I hit the first 10 greens in regulation and found myself 2 over. One of the three putts was after hitting the pin with my approach shot. My driver and my irons were performing, my putter was not. The next day, I started putting with my eyes closed. My putting performance was not any different than the day before. I decided I couldn’t continue to play good golf while putting so poorly. I decided it was time to make a change and start figuring out how to get better.
My most recent round had 31 putts, and I was positive putting from a strokes gained perspective (vs scratch). One round alone is not enough evidence of improvement, but four year later, I feel like I’m finally moving in the right direction with my putting. Importantly, my round did not have any long putts drained. It was mostly making things from inside 8 feet that drove my statistics up. An early round 3 putt reminds me that there is still work to do.
Improving at putting has been an interesting journey for me. I have continued to iterate what I do to improve, and I think it’s worth looking back on my experience and see if we can derive some ideas on what actually made me better. I threw a lot of ideas at the wall, so let’s dig through them and see if we can find any value.
There is a lot that goes into putting. Start line and break depend on speed. Speed depends on the green speed and the slope. All of those ideas go out the window if you aren’t putting a consistent stroke on the ball. Practicing by yourself, I never found a good way to gauge exactly what I had done wrong. Outside of blatant misses, putts didn’t drop for a variety of reasons. Was my speed right, but my starting line was off? Early on, I spent a ton of time doing gate drills to make sure I was delivering the club head consistently. My brain quickly adjusted to the task of not hitting the tees on the side of the ball, but it did not improve my actual putting.
The first thing I did was go and get fit for a putter. I went to SeeMore in Nashville, as they have a phenomenal reputation, and I had had positive interactions with the company online. I spent 3 hours with Cody, and we went over all aspects of my putting. At that time, it was the best putting lesson I had ever had. He got me into a putter that fit me well, and gave me some suggestions on what to work on. I got my new putter and started grinding.
I ran through a number of drills to improve my putting. I tried most of the things the “top pros” were doing, I used ladder drills, I putted to a tee, I putted to a ball mark. Eventually, I made up my own putting practice routine (18 putts from 1-18 steps, which is about 2.5 feet to 45 feet). I spent as much time as I could on the practice green. My three putts went down significantly, but my make rate from inside 10 feet was still mediocre.
Looking back, all that time spent on the practice green helped my speed control tremendously. The practice was good, and I eliminated a huge source of frustration for myself. I will still three putt but now it’s when I misjudge the speed. I have far less three putts that start with a brain dead first putt. While I mastered my speed, I still obviously had some work to do. Last season, my putting was still my biggest weakness. On average, I lost 4 strokes a round to a scratch player. Considering my handicap was a 4.5, putting was obviously the low hanging fruit for me.
In October, I played a round with Jon Sherman. Jon is a tremendous golf resource, and I was happy that I played decently with him. I still managed to throw away some strokes on the putting green. At the end of the round we were chatting, and he basically said “hey, you are good at golf. Fix your putting”. He was nicer about it than that, but he wasn’t wrong. The work I had done was helpful, but it wasn’t enough. I needed to make a more profound shift in my putting.
I asked Jayson who he recommended for putting, and he sent me to Chase Davis on Skillest. Chase was a revelation for me. I’m not sure if I just respond better to video feedback, but working with him was awesome. Filming myself, watching it, and checking to see if I was doing what we had previously discussed was a huge help. I knew exactly what I needed to work on, and through three lessons, I saw consistent improvement. Seeing the numbers improve on the course has been a great way to reinforce the practice.
As I write this all out, I realize that we can draw a quick conclusion of “find a coach you like, and work with them”. This is certainly a large part of improvement. As an amateur golfer, it’s not always easy to find a good coach. I’ve been lucky to work with Jayson, and through him Chase. They both give me feedback in a way that works for me, and in a format I’ve found to be helpful.
The other side of that, is that I had decided to make a change, and worked hard to improve on my own before consulting Chase. I spent a ton of time working on my putting, and was ready to get more help. I was open to changing everything in my putting, because I had failed to get my putting where it needs to be on my own.
On my own, I practiced a lot of things that had value. My tempo and speed control were both already pretty strong going into my lessons. Chase helped with my setup and my stroke, and it allowed me to use my hard earned skills to hit better putts. Maybe I would have been better off taking lessons first, and practicing second. I’ve spent 4 years working on my putting, so I certainly can’t argue about the efficiency of what I did. My work with Chase has helped clean up my stroke, which has given me more consistency, which has further helped my speed control. It’s an interesting rabbit hole, but my choices have been made.
My putting improvement is a good reminder that improving at golf is hard. It’s never just fixing one thing. A small change tends to have a large impact, and introduces new variables and issues. Fixing my starting line hurt my putting short term, because I was used to pulling everything left. My aim had naturally shifted to the right due to the pull, so I spent a few days missing everything to the right of the hole. Then I overcompensated and my miss shifted to the left.
I think there is a ton of value in “digging it out of the dirt” and spending time working on something as best we can. I tried a variety of drills, and now have experience with which ones generate value for me. If I’m struggling on speed control, I can do a ladder drill. If I need to get the ball past the hole, I can throw a ball marker down and make sure I hit it and roll 6-12 inches past it. Ultimately, working with a coach and getting actionable feedback is what delivered improvement for me. It tied in with all the practice I had done, and I was in a place where I was receptive to feedback, but coaching is what got me over the hump.
Hopefully, this season will be my best putting season to date.