Spring Cleaning for Your Golf Game:
Use These 3 Tips to Start the Season Strong and Save Strokes on the Course
Most golfers know all too well that long gaps in practice and play almost always result in diminished performance, and keeping up with your game through the winter months can be difficult due to weather and the demands of the lengthy holiday season. The first few rounds in the spring don’t have to be treated as the unavoidable penance required to shake off the rust and get back into the normal rhythms of your game. There are a few smart and strategic choices that every golfer can make on the course that will minimize the consequences of those inevitable mis-hits and keep the big numbers off your scorecard.
Going Long off the Tee is Smarter than it is Brave.
Don’t hit a long iron off the tee just because your driver is still pretty rusty. This may sound like hard advice to swallow, especially so if you’ve taken a long break from golf. Surely your 4-iron is more likely to keep you out of penalty and recovery situations, right? Sort of, but not in any way that meaningfully impacts your score. While finding more fairways does usually correlate with lower scores, the average golfer’s total left-to-right dispersion potential with their driver is not that much wider than it is with their longest irons. This means that while a shot with a driver will always have a slightly increased chance of missing the fairway, that chance will never outweigh the benefit gained from landing your tee shot 40-80 yards closer to the pin.
Don’t Go Pin Seeking, Go Green Seeking.
It’s old golf wisdom for a reason—take aim at the largest, safest area of the green complex instead of targeting the pin. This will always be a sound and obvious gameplan, especially if you’re still working the kinks out of your swing in the early days of the season, but I would like to encourage you to take this ethos one step farther. When strategizing your approach shots into the green, it’s important to be mindful of your dispersion patterns.
From 75-125 yards out, the average scratch golfer can expect to land their ball about 39 feet away from the pin, while a golfer playing off a 15 handicap should expect to be somewhere around 60 feet from the pin. Even for the best golfers, a potential landing zone with a radius of 39 feet could spell disaster for shots into tricky pin placements and well-bunkered green complexes. If you have a good understanding of your typical dispersion patterns it becomes easy to select a target point on the green that maximizes the chance that the next shot you’re taking is a putt.
Respect Trouble when it Finds You.
Playing good golf will never be as simple as hitting the ball well. There’s no shortage of trouble to be found in every round, on every course, on every hole—greenside bunkers, waste areas, trees, steep lies, hard-pan lies, plugged lies, divots, gunch, pine straw, and sprinkler heads all challenge our best laid plans and more importantly, these scenarios challenge our egos. Every golfer wants to execute a miraculous shot from a recovery situation, and when we do, nothing feels better—but more often than not an attempt to overcome trouble on the golf course with a hole saving hero-shot results in even more misfortune.
The smart golfer lets the environment choose the shot for them. Hard-pan next to the green? Don’t try your otherwise reliable pitch shot, hit a bump and run and skip the bladed ball. Fried Egg in a fairway bunker? Put your 6-iron back in the bag and focus on getting the ball safely back onto the grass with a wedge. When dealing with hazards on the course, choose shots in which you are the most confident about where the ball is going instead of taking a confident swing at an imbalanced risk-and-reward gamble.
Let TruGolf Help You Play Great Golf.
It’s no mystery that a Golf Simulator is the single best tool to stay on top of your game throughout the winter months, and TruGolf makes it easy to Play, Improve, and Enjoy the game year-round. TruGolf gives players intuitive and insightful visualizations of important data, like dispersion patterns and backspin on your wedge shots, so you can optimize every practice session and collect all the information that you need to play smarter, better, golf.
Play Confident. Swing Free. Golf Easy.
