Junior golfers need to track exactly what's killing their scores: out-of-bounds shots, three-putts, missed greens. Find the one thing costing the most strokes, then practice only that. A controlled curve beats a straight shot because it cuts penalties and gives you more margin for error.
I think that's completely crazy. You need to know why they shoot the numbers that they shoot. It's not just they shoot 79. Why? It's because we get 2 balls out of bounds per round. Is it because we 3-putt 3 times per round? Is it because when we don't hit the green regulation, we just make a mess, right? Is it because we have, you know, these, these compounding mistakes? Um, is it because we have one, one bad hole and all of a sudden we start spiraling? We have to be able to identify what's going on and not just, hey, I think this is what happens. Because that's where most families stop. They say, hey, we've got a problem, you know, they have a bad hole, they spiral, and then, you know, they shoot 83, right? Like that, as much as it seems like that's a solution, it's not, because we haven't quantified what it actually is. Because we do not go from, have this problem where I'm losing 3 shots per round, to I completely fixed it. So If we're able to say, hey, this one thing, if we clean this up, it's worth 3 shots per round on average. Well, we can go from 3 shots to 2 shots. It's still a problem, still might be the biggest problem, but we're a shot better, right? So it's understanding that a lot of the times the things that we need to do to shoot lower scores are not as hard as we think, but we need to have them more clearly defined. If you know their statistics for these, then you're going to be able to break this down and say, okay, out of all the things that we could improve What's going to have the biggest impact on their scores? Your child can just figure that one thing out, forget everything else, forget the rest of their practice plan, forget every single swing lesson they ever get. They just figure out that one thing, it's probably worth a few shots to them. You get 2 balls out of bounds, that's going to crush your scores. It's also going to crush your greens regulation, but it's going to crush your scores. A lot of swing coaches even push back on the idea that you should curve the golf ball any substantial amount. I completely reject that. I think that's completely crazy. I think if you watch any of the shot tracer videos on the PGA Tour, LPGA Tour, you're you see them curving the golf ball. So we need to have reliable curve, right? Instead of trying to hit the ball straight where you cut your literal margin for error in half, you're going to cut down your penalties, especially if you train that in practice.
