If John Rahm’s recommendation to weekend golfers is to know your carry distances then I will follow it. Personally I’ve always felt like I’ve judged my distances well on the course, especially for higher lofted clubs. However, my ability to hit the ball straight is the issue.
Taking the time to record my carry distances for my 7 club bag was humbling and eye-opening. I’ve known forever my tee ball, fairway woods and long irons were the weakest points of my game. But let’s dive in and take a look at the results.
Stock Carry & Total Distance Breakdown (17 Handicap)
I’ll work through my bag top down, and fortunately only need to look through 6 clubs.
- Driver
- My Analysis: Seeing a 10 yard carry difference is pretty disheartening and makes me feel like I should be considering hitting it off-the-deck to lessen my dispersion.
- Next Steps: I’m going to spend some time researching drills on how to hit up on my driver and experiment with different tee heights
- 5 Iron
- My Analysis: Ouch! My carry distance was 3 yards less than my 7 iron and only 8 yards longer overall. Worms fear me! I’d expect to see my closer to 170 given my gaping.
- Next Steps: I’m going to start with a towel drill across my irons placing it a few inches behind the ball so I can focus on compressing it as much as possible.
- 7 iron
- My Analysis: This is where I start to get more comfortable in my bag. During my session I had one big push and one big pull that created the large dispersion but overall I’m happy with this.
- 9 iron, Pitching Wedge, 54 Degree
- My Analysis: This is the stronger part of my game and overall really just want to focus on consistency of these shots. I believe the towel drill and working on tempo will help drop all three of these clubs a few yards
Going into October, I’ll be focusing more on Skytrak range sessions and less so on full rounds to really hone in on my practice. I’ll redo the same analysis of stock yardages and dispersion at the end of October to see how practice impacts the results.
Minimalist Golf 