How golf practice is catching up with training in other sports

At some point, thinking about golf practice brought me back to my earliest days on skates.

Some background here would help: When I grew up playing hockey, most of the drills in practice emphasized isolated skills. The coach would line us up at one end of the rink and blow a whistle, and then we skated down to the other end. Sometimes we had a puck, or we curled around a cone. Occasionally, we had to drop down to one knee and stand up quickly. It was all very challenging and frenetic. Then I got older, and I realized those drills hardly resembled actual hockey.

What does this have to do with golf? Stay with me.

In the time between when I learned to play hockey and I started coaching my own boys, officials at USA Hockey determined the better way to develop hockey players was to encourage training conditions that felt more like games. As coaches, we have been encouraged to segment rinks into small areas and force players to compete in tighter spaces. In drills, we resist telling players where they should skate or pass the puck, because we want them to develop those instincts without us. Why? Because that’s what players rely on in real games.



“There is no one way to solve every equation on the ice,” Bob Mancini, the USA Hockey official who spearheaded the training model, told me. “So we wanted to create an environment that can put the players in those situations where they have to make decisions on their own.”

The connection to golf is that our version of golf practice is as archaic as hockey drills of skating straight up and down ice rinks. A bucket of balls at our feet. A target off in the distance. Like my early days learning hockey, it’s better than doing nothing. But if the goal is to compete effectively, there are much better ways to spend your time.

In a new Golf Digest feature, I examine the shifting mindset around golf practice, and how the most innovative golf coaches prioritize competitive situations in their sessions with students. The title, We’ve been practicing all wrong, is not to dismiss the importance of technical refinements to a golfer’s swing. But it does argue we need to pay more attention to what happens next. I canvas a wide spectrum of experiences—high-end clubs, colleges with elaborate practice areas, but also modest municipal courses. The consistent thread is a shift to practice routines structured around consequences. It’s not enough to focus on mechanics. You need to test those mechanics under the type of strain you might experience on the course.



“People don’t want to fail on the golf course, but that’s not the right way to coach them because it’s going to happen,” says Darren May, the golf coach at The Grove XXIII, who also works with Keegan Bradley. “I’m desensitizing them to it, so they have a better sense of what they can handle and what they can’t.”

The story isn’t just about why you need to practice differently, but some insights into how, and Golf Digest will be there to help by introducing a series of “Stress Tests”—practice games designed by experts that measure different skills under pressure. In the same way hockey drills are looking more like hockey games, the goal is to transfer your practice into competition.