Getting Some Expert Opinion...

Droppin' Strokes
Jun 2
3 min read

Well, enough is enough. The struggle this season has been.. bewildering. So I've got a lesson booked for Monday. Hopefully, I'll be figuring some things out and be back to playing like I know I can.

I thought that before this lesson, it might be helpful to lay out everything that has been going wrong this season so I might be able to help nail down some things to look at. This might be a lot, and I'm going to do my best to be honest with myself and with you. And if it's not a little bit embarrassing, it's not honest when it comes to golf.

I'll be using some of my Shot Scope data for the year, as well as some of the results from using Adam Young's Stats Tracking Sheet to highlight some of these areas.

Driver

The untimely death of my Ping G400 last season left a large hole in my bag, and an even bigger one in my heart. But, I was able to find a great deal on a Titleist TSR2 with a sweet Graphite Design Tour AD shaft to replace it. And to start the season, it was going pretty well. But it's since cooled off. And when the driver has cooled off, there's not much left to help salvage a good round.

Lots of issues hitting off the heel earlier in the year, recently starting to hit pulls/pull-hooks
Fairly low shots (often low on the face) and with not much distance (about 20 yards shorter on average than my last driver)
Driver accuracy for 2025

Approach play

In previous seasons, I've had some slow starts, and the culprit usually was my backswing coming back far too shallow. This led to an over-the-top move with a lot of shanks. This seems to be a frequent early-season issue for me. Honestly, I wish I had looked back at my struggles with shanks from last season to try and figure this out earlier. While I've had some success this season when I focus on taking my club straight back (or what feels like straight back), there are still plenty of issues that pop up:

Lots of thin shots/tops
Hosel shots
Long irons going left (push, not slice)

Wedges

The wedges tend to be where the shanks show up most. But I'm still liking the new wedges. When I do hit the how i want, the ball is carrying well and stopping nicely. There have been a few thin shots as well, but not as much as with the irons.

Putting

My Strokes Gained says my putting has been poor, but it doesn't feel that way. I could be better with distance control, as I tend to come up short quite frequently. But my putting seems to be pretty close to typical for me, and it seems like my focus should be on ball striking until I bring that back up.

What The Stats Trackers Say

I've used the Stat Tracker sheets from Adam Young for four rounds so far and they seem to be backing up quite a bit of what I think is my major issue - approach play. Counting up my ticks in those four rounds, there are 30 ticks for thin shots (18 coming from today...) and 10 heel shots (AKA, hosel rockets). There was also one bad round where I was pulling the driver pretty consistently but I ended up following that up with a round without a single tick on the sheet.

These sheets have been handy to have with me to track how I'm doing. Hopefully, soon these sheets will see a lot fewer tallies on them.

The Rest

There might need to be a more thorough overhaul of my swing, beyond just getting me back to how I was swinging at the end of last season. I have a lot of external rotation in my arms at setup and have developed a bit of golfer's elbow. If having to start from scratch means that my body will be able to golf for years to come, I'm all for it.