Dear Neil,
Great to hear from you, and thanks for contacting me! Let me respond in two main ways: practice and play.
Practice: In my experience, that age group is pretty keen to collect knowledge and to experiment, so the coaching trick for putting is to give the golfers the right issues to work on and to solve to their personal satisfaction -- touch or distance control, straight putting, routine for aiming, and putt reading. My paper on the "Four Fundamental Elements of Putting Skill" covers the technical subject matter for these four topics (
http://puttingzone.com/ziptips.html). More broadly, the golfers need a structured practice regimen with tests and record-keeping so that advancement towards ever-higher goals can be observed objectively. I also have a set of 55 "Drills for Putting Skills" separated into the above four fundamentals, here:
http://puttingzone.com/drills.html.
For example, using a simple string line setup for a straight putt of about 15-20 feet, see how many sinks the golfer can achieve out of 10 tries, and write down the results each 10-putt trial. After a while, an average emerges. The goal is to move this average upward over a reasonable period of time. Another example might be seeing how many putts in a row the golfer can sink from 4-5 feet, keeping a record of the results. Another example is perhaps a touch drill, to see how many long putts to a distant fringe the golfer can stop within 1 foot of the fringe but not onto the fringe. For reading putts, you will see how important the "fall line" is to break, so accurately identifying the fall line thru a cup is a key skill, as this leads to the target spot on the high side of the fall line to start the putt towards, and also serves as the distance reference where the imagined straight putt should come to an end. This can be tested in a number of ways. One is by having the golfer try to identify the exact straight uphill-downhill line thru a cup, and then test this by putting along this line to see whether the ball rolls straight or breaks to one side or the other. Another test is by having the golfer read different putts and indicate his notion of the target spot's location with a tee peg, and then have someone else putt straight at the tee peg with appropriate touch to simply contact the peg lightly, and see how close this comes to successfully sinking the putt. Another test of putt reading is to test the ability to sink downhill breaking putts, which requires a keen appreciation of the fall line and the touch of a magician to send the ball fearlessly at the target spot on the fall line above the cup with just the right touch that feeds the ball onto the only fall line that counts.
Games and competitions in practice also help motivate the golfers. I have a couple of games on my website in the "MyTips" section, but you can also make up others.
One big idea of practice is that a goodly portion of practice should be "consequential" practice. That is, not just a series of putts, but practice as in an on-course situation where each stroke counts. One way to do this is to set goals for up-and-down scrambling from just off the green or in a bunker. The golfer is challenged to chip onto the green close and then go finish up by sinking whatever putt he has left. This can be an individual testing, to see how many times out of 10 the golfer gets up and down with results recorded, or in the form of a competition: two players compete for "skins" (one skin every time one player bests the other in strokes) until one player reaches five skins.
Play: The main idea for helping the golfer take the skills from the practice green to the course is to identify the types of putts they usually face and to work on weaknesses and to strengthen strengths. Everyone usually keeps records of the total number of putts and the number of 3-putts, but perhaps a more comprehensive approach would help more. The golfer could keep track of the footage of each putt, type (straight uphill, straight downhill, l-r, r-l, l-r uphill, l-r downhill, r-l uphill, r-l downhill, multiple breaker) and the results of each putt (sink, miss online-short, miss low-long, low-short, hi-long, hi-short). This will show the characteristic distance of the first putts faced by the golfer and also reveal specific weaknesses, such as pulls on short putts or leaving long lags short. The golfer's basic advancement can be observed in terms of total footage of all putts divided by total number of putts (e.g., 180 feet of putts with 30 putts gives an average make/sink of 6 feet), so that this number is increased, the number of three-putts is decreased, and the percentage of sinks in the 10-foot zone is increased.
I would suggest using notecards for each practice or play session for the players to keep track of specific drills or playing performance statistics. These dated cards would then be returned to the coach each day for keeping and evaluation for each player. Players could be recognized often for specific best achievements in the group, such as the week's best improvement, or the week's best on-course footage per putts number, or the least 3-putts, or the lowest total number of putts.
If you tell me your telephone number, I have free calling to Scotland and can call you to discuss this further. Thanks again.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Theorist and Instructor
Geoff Mangum's PuttingZone
http://puttingzone.com
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