The Challenge: Most high-handicap golfers lack a pre-round strategy. In fact, they spend little time thinking about an upcoming round or match. And even less time thinking about course conditions. Instead, they just step up and hit the ball. Thus, they’re unprepared to address the challenging shots that arise during a round or a match. Lack of preparation often costs you strokes, many of which could have been avoided with a little forethought.
The Solution: This one act alone of giving your round some careful thought beforehand can help you drop shots without even picking up a club! Developing a pre-round strategy is essential to playing well. Knowing what’s coming helps you focus on the job at hand and anticipate and overcome problems. While everyone’s individual strategy will be different, some common elements run through almost all pre-round strategies. Here’s what I recommend:
Most pre-round strategies start with the course. If it’s one you’ve played, develop a strategy for playing it but be prepared to modify it depending on the conditions when you play.
If it’s a course you’ve never played, find out as much about it as you can. What type of course is it? What condition is it in? Does it play long? How are the greens? What holes can you score on? Are their problem holes? These are some of the questions you should be asking when evaluating a course. If you know someone who has played the course, ask him or her about it. Gather as much intelligence about the course as you can.
Next, set some pre-round objectives. Again, these will depend on the individual, but may involve things like the total number of putts, the total number of fairways hit from the tee, or the number of greens hit in regulation. Whatever they are, it’s to your benefit to have something specific to shoot for in each round.
After you’ve set your objectives, start thinking about a strategy for achieving them. If it’s the type of course that suits your game, you might want be aggressive. If it’s the type of course that doesn’t suit your game, you might want to play more conservatively. Plan how to play each hole. A lot of courses have their layouts on their Web sites. Or maybe you can obtain a scorecard or a yardage book. Familiarizing yourself with the holes and planning how to play them helps minimize strokes. Make notes if it helps. Finally, work your plan. There’s no sense in developing plans if you don’t use them. I’ve known players who’ve developed good pre-round strategies only to throw them away once they tee off. It’s not easy following a pre-round strategy, especially if you’re having a bad day; but if you develop one you may as well use it.
Practice Drill: Plan For Success
Find a course layout of your home course or the next one you’ll be playing and map out your plan of attack to drop seven shots. This first thing you should do is try to get a blank scorecard BEFORE our round and fill it in with your planned scores. I recommend doing this at least a day before your round if possible so you can really think about how you will be playing each hole and visualize the shots accordingly. Instead of letting bogeys happen to you, you are already factoring them into your gameplan so you are emotionally and psychologically prepared for the adversity that accompanies those scores. The second is to segment the round into smaller parts. In other words, set goals for 3 sets of 6 holes each rather than saying “I want to shoot 89 today”. This breaks up your larger goal into much more manageable parts and keeps you focused and attentive because you are set to achieve these smaller goals at 3 distinct times throughout the round rather than having to wait roughly 5-6 hours to to play the entire round and see if you made your goal. So, if you were trying to shoot 89, you would set a goal of 29.6 strokes per each group of six holes.
Want to improve your golf swing? For more golf swing tips, I recommend checking out the guide to a Simple Golf Swing.
Mark