Womens Golf: Your Short Game

Improving your short game… it was the mantra I heard over and over from my golfer husband. It was the one thing he really tried to get me to focus on as I searched for opportunities to lower my scores.

Since I am a beginning golfer, I found that I couldn’t concentrate on improving every thing at once, so I decided to focus on the basics, more specifically, the basics of my short game.

Putting is the first area I decided to focus on.

I was confident that if I could improve my putting, I would improve my short game and if I improved my short game my scorecard would show the results. I was committed to practicing my putting and reaping the benefits on the greens.

Being a beginning golfer, I take all the help I can get to improve my golf game. My husband, an avid golfer, and my teaching professional shared some excellent putting tips with me.

The first golf drill I learned was to lay two clubs on the ground parallel to each other, keeping the width a little more that the head of the putter. My goal was to practice putting my shot through the clubs and into the hole. This golf drill really helped me to see the line to the hole and to understand more of the relationship between my stroke and the end result.

The second golf drill I learned that helped me with my putting was a distance drill. My instructor laid a club about three feet behind the hole on the practice green. Then on the opposite side of the hole, we marked off 3 feet, 6 feet and 9 feet.

My goal was to make three putts from each of the designated distances. If I made all three putts, I would move on to the next farthest distance. If I didn’t make all three putts, I would start over and keep going until I made three putts in a row. The club behind the hole was my visual clue.

Even if I missed the putt, my second goal was to make sure the putt stopped before it got to the club. I never wanted to just keep hitting the putt from one side of the hole to the other. Because of my commitment to the game of golf, I repeated this drill for at least half of my practice time.

It wasn’t long before I began to develop better control of my putter and as a result I began to see a difference in my golf scores. Improving your short game takes practice, yes, but it is definitely worth it.