A year of the big stick

It’s been one year, give or take a week, since I hit the driver for the first time.

It’s been one heck of a year, too.  The first round I played with the big stick was down at Bandon Dunes last November.  At the time, I still just had 6 clubs: Driver, 3-hybrid, 6-iron, 8-iron, PW, putter and was just beginning to creep onto the course.  Since then, I filled out the remainder of the clubs and have been playing a full 14-club bag since the beginning of this year.  In old school terms, that means I carry:

Driver (1 wood)

Spoon (3 wood)

Mid Mashie (3-iron)

Jigger (4-iron)

Mashie (5-iron)

Spade Mashie (6-iron)

Mashie Niblick (7-iron)

Pitching Niblick (8-iron)

Niblick (9-iron)

Wedges and Putter.

When you do something every day it’s easy to lose track of where you came from and to take progress for granted.  This is especially true if you read forum threads about your project :); but to be honest, some great strides have been made in the one year since my inaugural driver swing.

Really great strides.  I literally had never swung a driver before mid-November last year and now my stats look something like this:

That is a view of the last 20 rounds of golf that I have played.  Talking with Stuart (he helps me establish goals for The Plan), my goal for 4,000 hours was to be at 50% of Fairways hit.  Seeing as that has already been accomplished, I can up the goal and shoot for closer to 60% by 4,000 hours.  My actual goal is to be at 57% at that hour mark, leaving me 6,000 hours to improve on that and surpass the PGA Tour average of just more than 60%.

The real gold isn’t the percent of fairway hit, but the severity of the miss.  My misses have gotten significantly better.  During the first few months with the driver, when I missed the ball I really missed the ball.  I would top it, hook it, slice it, sky ball it, etc.  Now, I have misses that I can normally play with and the horrid drives have become black swan events.

I don’t know exactly where I’ll be a year from today, but I know that I will be more confident and much better with everything from the Driver to the Niblick.  That’s what practice does.  A year ago I looked like I had never swung a driver; today I have a swing speed of roughly 105mph and hit a hair over 50% of all fairways.  Through continued deliberate practice and workouts, the plan is to push that mph and accuracy up.

It will be interesting to look back next November and reminisce on swings past.  In the meantime, there is a lot of work to do and only so much winter sun to do it in…

 

PS on the TrackMan:

All is working and well, except that the laptop I was hoping to use (Dell) has a battery that apparently has to be plugged in to work.  It’s a dead cell and I ordered a new one, which unfortunately is not scheduled to arrive until November 27.  In the meantime I am running through the software and going to do a training seminar this evening about how to best utilize this tool.  It feels like when you were a kid and got the cool remote control car for Christmas but it didn’t come with batteries so you had to just sit there and look at it for a couple of days.  So excited to get it out there and start learning with TrackMan.  But, I suppose with the 2 inches of rain and 50mph winds hitting the Portland area today I wouldn’t be able to use it anyway.  Good things are on the horizon.