Winter golf plans beginning to concrete

I heard from a friend yesterday who works/practices in Palm Springs from December to January who said he has an extra room for me for the first 3 weeks in January.  This is awesome news as it gives me a temporary home base down in the desert where I can work with coach Bruce as well as try out desert golf for the first time.

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to make that trip feasible and having a place to crash for at least 3 weeks definitely makes the drive down worth it.

I also found out I have a cousin who is a PGA golf pro down there that I have not seen in about 25 years.  He has a family now with two boys and is the head PGA Pro of a course (leaving the name out for now as I don’t know if he wants me talking about it/him yet). It will be interesting to catch up and meet his family.  Who would have known that I had a family member in the golf business?!  I love it.

That’s the news for January 2014.  I will be down in Palm Spring and probably head out January 2nd from Portland, driving down there.  There is a long time reader of the blog, Mr. Crane, that I want to visit in Northern California along the way, and if anyone else is on the Portland-Palm Springs route please hit me up and let’s play 18.  I don’t want to dilly-dally for too long, but a couple of rounds on the road is a great way to break up a 20 hour drive.

Also, I just received confirmation that I have a Titleist fitting date on January 15 down in Oceanside.  Carlsbad/Oceanside is about 2 hours from the desert so will be a great day trip to see the guys in the fitting facility and have an updated club fitting.  As regular readers to this site know, I have been loving my Vokey Wedges and AP2 irons, but have struggled with the 3-wood and hybrid.  It will be extremely interesting to get their feedback on why I have been hitting it as I have.

Speaking of that, I have been working hard with my TrackMan lately to figure out why my misses are so askew.  The first thing that stood out when I had a driver session today was how far inside to out I have been swinging the club. A lot of people struggle with coming over the top in the golf swing, but for me, my big miss is when I come too far from the inside. I’m talking like 10-12 degrees from inside out.  When you do that and don’t have immaculate control of the club face you get a major two way miss.

Here is the link to today’s TrackMan session:  TrackMan driver and 7-iron link

One caveat:  My goal was to find club path and figure out how to better square up my path.  Also, I was working with limited-flight range balls hitting into the wind on a 47 degree day with 10mph winds directly into face.  So..  Don’t get hung up on distance or some-such.   The point of the session was to figure out how my club was going through the ball and work on that.

Through this session I learned a lot about what it felt like to get through square.  To me, it felt like I had to cut the stuffing out of the ball just to get the club path number to 0.  I was pretty shocked, but then again that’s golf.

I did have a major breakthrough once again while working through these swings.  I realized that what I needed to feel through my drive was a total different sensation in my entire body starting with my glutes.  I took this feeling out to the course and shot a 79 from the blue tees with a triple on the 12th hole at Riverside.  I still only hit 5 fairways, but that’s way more than I have been hitting lately and the ones I missed were when I lost my feel.

That brings me to the point that I want to investigate.  What is the best way to ingrain a feel into your game.  How do we forget something that we have done for so long and “know” the new aspect of our swing/game.  I want to know more about the science of learning and will be delving into this shortly.  Posts will come soon on what I find.

Cheers!

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