How I Dropped 7 Strokes in 6 months

2023 was an incredible year for my golf game. I started out as an iffy 15 handicap but found a rock-solid game and got all the way down to an 8.4 by year end.

I did this all thanks to several tools, resources, a friendly competition and of course my wife. Let’s dive in:

History

Up until 2023, I played golf casually with no more than 15 rounds logged in a years time. But after being introduced to the chase and scratch podcast, the competitive spirit animal, deep down inside me awakened, and thus sent me on my journey to become a better golfer.

The plan was simple: get a good golf swing and go out and shoot lower scores.

Boy, was I wrong.

I first signed up for a 10 lesson pack with Golf Tech, who would analyze my swing with video and start to put me in the correct positions. Having played college basketball, I have great body awareness but struggled to get my lanky body into the exact positions. I go every 2 weeks or so for my tune up and then use the time in between to cement it into my brain. Just like shooting at free-throw, it’s all repetition, repetition, repetition.

Upon graduation, I hit the links ready to challenge the course record. And I did. Just not the low side of the record.

Looking back, I was so deep into my thoughts about having my arms and wrists and hips and butt and shoulder and tilts and, and, and into the right position that I wasn’t even playing golf. I was playing golf swing. And my score reflected it.

Now, I don’t wanna take away anything from my time at GolfTec and getting swing lessons because it was invaluable for me to see myself on camera, and to understand the foundational elements of a golf swing. I highly recommend any beginner to get a lesson or two from there so you can get that same type of understanding.

But there’s more to golf than just the swing. I had to learn HOW to play the GAME of golf.

So I picked up book recommendation from the podcast, the Four Foundations of Golf by the Jon Sherman and it opened my eyes to a brand new side of the game. The Data and Strategy side.

Learning HOW to Play the Game

Growing up, I was never the best at video games, but I was pretty good at figuring out how to exploit a game’s weakness (setting claymore’s in COD around certain corners or in Super Mario Brothers, you don’t have to land on an enemy to kill it… you only have to have downward momentum and it does the same thing) and thus I’d often outplay my friends thanks to some legal cheating.

I found The 4 Foundations book to be a game changer for me because it showed me how to exploit certain areas of the game to shoot lower scores. Not only did it teach me how to physically play the game, but more importantly, how to mentally play the game. I read a stat that said something like “in the 4 hour around, you’re only actively hitting the ball for about 22 minutes. So what are you doing with the other 3 hours and 39 minutes?” The most critical area of the book made me realize - what is a good shot… for me?

The answer to this question took me down, another massive rabbit hole known as “strokes gained.”

Manage Expectations

This methodology was, from my best guess, coined by Mark Brodie and splashed onto the scene in his book “Every Stroke Counts”. This is another must-read for anyone looking to take Golf seriously, but the main premise is that throughout the course of the round, you’re going to hit good shots and bad shots relative to your peers. And not just the people you are playing with, but with every golfer in the world. You might be thinking. “well duh, that doesn’t sound very groundbreaking” and I’d mostly agree with you except it helped debunk A LOT of myths I had about scratch players and the pros. (More on this later in the practice section).

For example, when I watch the pros on TV, they make everything from inside of 10 feet. I thought I had to do that. Or when they’re 100 yards out in the middle of the fairway, they are sticking it to a 5 foot circle every single time. And when I was merely 30 feet away, but still on the green, I’d lose my cool and curse myself out.

But thanks to all of the data, we know these two statements simply are not true. The make rate for a tour pro from 10 feet… Drum roll… 40%. The average distance to the hole from 100 yards in the fairway…. 15’ 6”. That’s 3x further than what I thought!

And these are tour pros. These numbers drastically increase when you look at scratch players, then, five handicap, 10 handicap, 15 handicap, 20 handicap players.

So instead of beating myself up mentally and telling myself that I suck when I can’t land it within 5 feet from 100 yards out and instead land it to 15 feet, I actually need to be celebrating because I just outperformed 99.3% of players at my skill level. This was the monumental shift in my game and freed me up to play better golf. #ManageExpectations

Managing the Course

The next big hurdle I tackled was Course Management. Jon certainly talks about this in his book, but I found Scott Fawcett to be the absolute best. He teaches a strategy he coined called DECADE.

You can certainly find plenty of his stuff for free on YouTube but I did sign up for his 6 month program. In it, he drips content to you every month and expects you to go practice what you learned. My biggest takeaways were the realization of “Shot Dispersion”, using that to pick the best targets and the importance of hitting the ball very far. And picking better targets, I.E. away from OB or water will lead to less penalty strokes and (you guessed it) lower scores.

Here are 2 shot dispersions from an 8 iron and 6 iron. I’m hitting on an indoor simulator with a perfect lie every time and perfect 72 degree weather.

From now on, when someone asks me “how far do you hit your 8 iron?” I don’t say “usually 165.” Instead, I now say “somewhere between 150 and 170, depending on strike.” And how this translates to picking better targets is I know I’m roughly 30 yards wide with a 6 iron so my target line is a good 15-17 yards away from trouble.

Oh, this might also be a great time to tell you about how I use Google to map the course prior to my round - especially for new courses. I spend about 30 minutes the night before to scroll and measure distances in Google Earth to find the best tee shot targets and then measure out the width of potential approach shots. When I’m standing on the tee the next day, I’ll not spending mental energy deciding where to aim.

The Long Ball

Mark Brodie and Jon Sherman both talked about distance in their books but for whatever reason, the way Scott described how important distance is, it struck home.

Back to the concept of Strokes Gained, on a million golf shots you will shoot lower scores when you hit the ball further (you just have keep it in play). So I took that as the defining point that I will figure my driver out. Not only that, but I invested into Speed Training with the Stack System.

The combination of these 2 things made golf a LOT easier. Instead of hitting long irons into greens which have a wider shot dispersion, I was hitting wedges in which typically have a more narrow dispersion. This translated into more greens hit. Which meant more putting versus chipping. Which meant more Pars and Bogeys versus Doubles and Triples.

The game all of a sudden became very fun!

What to Practice

The old me would go out to the driving range (on an inconsistent basis) and beat a bucket of balls while grabbing whatever club or clubs that didn’t perform well during my last round.

Maybe I putted. Maybe I chipped. Maybe I didn’t. It was mostly dictated by how much time I had. But in 2023, I invested in myself and worked with Adam Young to get a real practice plan that developed real golf skills.

And it worked.

Below is a sample of the schedule I built for myself and how it went. If you are serious and want to shoot better scores, you have to treat this like you’re a real golfer.

Competition

Having been a long time listener to the Chasing Scratch Podcast, in season 6 they started something called the Gauntlet which put them in a competition weekly against one another even though they were 3 states away from one another. I decided to steal the idea and start up my own Gauntlet league with my brother, bro-in-law, cousin and best friend. Outside of my best friend, the others live in different towns so this was the perfect way to compete and add pressure to my game.

I’ll go deeper into the setup of the league in a subsequent post, but the premise is, whoever has the lowest handicap differential for their first round in a 2 week period, earns some points. And whoever has the most points at the end of the season, wins the league and the Gauntlet Hammer.

This league did 2 very important things for me:

1. Forced me to practice and stay sharp all season long

2. Gave me a great excuse for my wife as to why I had to go play golf. “Sorry babe, I can’t make Sarah’s baby shower because I have to get my Gauntlet round in or I lose points.”

Again, I’ll dive deeper into how it all played out, but the TLDR is, despite an injury in early August which forced me to not play for 2 weeks, I won the whole thing.

Not only did I win it, but I managed to shoot my lowest score ever towards the end of the season - a 74. I was in the zone that day and everything that I’d been working on was just clicking. I also felt a sense of relief too because it finally felt like it validated all of the work and good elements of my game.

Wrap Up

I’ve very much learned that Golf is a game of inconsistency. One week, your swing is in shambles, the next week you’re considering joining the Korn Ferry Tour. Heck, it feels like that from hole to hole and shot to shot. But I love the challenges and I love the feeling of a purely struck 6 iron.

2024 is already off and running. The Gauntlet League kicked off with 7 more people in there on April 15th and I’ve already put up a differential that would have been 2nd best last year.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you. What are your plans for 2024? What do you want to improve? What are your goals? Send me an email I’ll be glad to jump on a call to help you strategize your 2024 season.