Ask the Top 100: How to Raise the Next Golf Superstar
E-mail askgolf@golf.com to cure what's hurting your scores with advice from the very best teachers in the game. Please include your name and hometown. Do you have a video of your faulty swing? Upload the video from your digital camera to a service like YouTube and send us the link. We'll send it off to a Top 100 Teacher for help ASAP.
Dear T.J.,
My daughter is 8-years-old and she plays pretty well. Could you take a look at her swing and recommend any drills to practice over the winter.
Greg, Columbus, Ohio
Dear Greg,
My first word of advice: Take advantage of the real estate bargains in Florida right now and buy yourself a condo. It will make it easier to train this budding super-starlet during the winters to come. Somebody has done a heck of a job bringing her along.
The one thing she should work on is her forearm rotation -- it's much too active as she takes the club away. The left arm is over-powering the right and, as a result, the clubhead rotates too deeply behind her body line. Stop the video when the clubhead reaches the tree line and you’ll see how much she’s over-rotated her forearms -- both the clubface and the back of her left hand look at the sky. This happens to a lot of juniors who start golf when they’re not strong enough to set the club upward, so they let it swing too much around them. She’s strong enough now to break this habit.
The Drill
Use a thin stick or a clubshaft as a pointer and slide it into your grip so it becomes an extension of the butt end of the shaft. Assume your normal address position and swing back until your left arm is parallel with the ground about halfway up your chest. The pointer extension should aim at the target line.
Look at the player below (you might recognize him). In this picture, he is perfectly on plane with the clubhead over his right shoulder. The yellow line represents the pointer as it aims at the target line.
Golf Magazine Top 100 Teacher T.J. Tomasi, Ph.D., a Class A PGA professional, teaches at the Nantucket Golf Club in Massachusetts. You can learn more about T.J. at tjtomasi.com
