Getting Started

Getting started in golf can be tough for juniors and adults. These fundamentals will help any new golfer have a more comfortable experience getting aquainted with the great game of golf.

Whenever you have your child out on the golf course you want them working on something. 

Now what we are going to do is get ready to hit balls, but when they hit balls once again I want them to work on something. I am going to turn to the young ladies over here and I am going to ask them to do this.

• Put your feet together, spread your feet out, I want a full practice swing with the one, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.
• Now I want you to put the clubhead behind the ball, heel, toe and sole flat on the ground, put your feet together Sammy, now spread your feet out under your shoulders and go ahead and rip that ball. One, two, three, four.
• Hold that finish position.

Now, you will notice what I did was put them through a routine. The important thing about this routine is that what I have them doing just by having them setting up with the club down behind the ball, the heel, toe and sole flat on the ground, putting their feet together and spreading their feet out, you will notice that I am working on clubface alignment and body alignment and they probably can not even spell that word yet. But while we are waiting for those swings to materialize we always want them working on something. In this case here it is their routine and their alignment.

What I would ask you to do is just take your 7-iron and hold it out at arm's length and feel the weight of the club. Then take the club and cock that wrist so that it is a 90 degree angle with your arm and tell me which is lighter, the one with the wrist up or the one parallel to the ground? You will quickly see that with the wrist cock and the club pointing up is much, much lighter.

1. First of all, turn your cell phone off. You don't want your phone ringing in your backswing or someone else's. Noise is such a deterrent in the golf game so be very quite, stand still, don't jingle change in your pocket and always stand a safe distance from you're your partner.
2. Don't stand on the tee and also stand facing your partner, never in front of which is a safety issue, and certainly not in back of because that person can see you with their peripheral vision.
3. As we move forward onto the golf course and the green, the line of the putt is the line between the hole and where your ball is located. Never walk in that line because you don't want to leave footprint or indentations that will affect the roll of the ball. Always walk around the hole or in back of the person who is putting.

These are issues that really involve a lot of common sense but very important if you want to be a favored guest or golf partner.

• When you put your glove on your hand and when you put some material between your hand and your grip that always softens the grip pressure. That is very important in a game where we are trying to allow the golf club to swing freely. Any kind of tightening of the hands, especially the lead hand, is going to tend to leave the clubface more open. That is one reason.
• The second reason is that coaches and instructors when the game started wanted to separate what the hands do. The left hand has a different role than the right hand in the golf swing. So by placing a glove on there you separate your hands from their different roles. You can feel your left hand more than your trail hand.

You do not assume anything with a child when you are teaching them to play golf. Even something as simple as putting a tee in the ground, they need to be taught.

• What I am going to do is stand in front of them, I am going to show them to put a tee between their fingers.
• I will show them how to put a ball in the palm of their hand and make a fist.
• The next thing I will have them do is bend over, turn the hand over, try to find a soft spot in the ground and let the ball push the tee into the ground. That is going to help them out.

Hi, welcome to the game of golf. This is a great game you can play for the rest of your life. The object of this game is to start on a hole, there’s usually 18 of them. You start from a tee box and you try to get your ball from the tee box into the hole, in the fewest number of shots possible. On every hole, there are a variety of tee boxes, so that players of different levels can play together. Usually the longest players play from the back tees and then it progresses on up to the forward tees so that everyone can have fun. Come on, play along with me.