Transcripts - Episode 9: Three Skills to Sharpen in the Off-Season

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Now, here’s your host, Corey, with another episode of the Birdie Board Podcast.

Welcome to episode 9 of the Birdie Board Podcast. Today I’m going to talk about three skills that I’ve been trying to just nail down about what can I do better in this off season. These three skills are really a reflection of what you can do on the course, but it’s trying to figure out what you can do during the winter as well. Because one of the things I’m trying to do is just what can I do to make the most of my golf game this winter?

Especially for a lot of people, I think, where they don’t have like an at-home practice facility or anything like that. What can they do to hit the ground running this off season and just get better so that we can be better this next spring?

It’s November right now. We have quite a bit of time, unfortunately. I’m disappointed about it, too. The golf season is pretty much at the end, especially in the Northeast. I’m in the Pennsylvania area. Last week it was very windy. I got terrible chapped lips. I was just outside, just moving from our apartment into a home. It was terrible. It was cold. It was windy. It was kind of rainy some days. It was a clear indicator that the golf season is pretty much over.

I have golfed before in really cold weather and even colder weather than this. I think, two years ago, I golfed in the middle of January and it was like 11 degrees. I actually ended up walking the 4.18, and the only reason I walked it is because I was trying to stay warm. I had foot warmers and hand warmers. I got through. I don’t think I hit a ball farther than 200 yards all day long. That being said, I haven’t golfed in that cold weather ever since.

The golf season is over, but trying to figure out what can I do in the off season to get better.

The first skill I thought about that I could practice in the off season is just course awareness. This is just trying to help you understand and audit the course. This is something we can do during the winter. Think about the rounds that you’ve played over the last year. Think about what could you have done differently.

For example, I’m thinking about a lot of the shots I took into the green last year. I would take 25 yards in, or maybe even closer. Imagine you’re facing a green. You have nothing but fairway down to the green. I would take a 56-degree wedge to the green. Honestly, I just needed to do a bump and run up there, but I didn’t have that in my bag. I just don’t know how to hit a bump and run super well.

One reflection that I have for my course awareness is like, okay, I need to make sure at the start of next off season, or the next golf season, to practice the bump and run because that awareness there would be so much better than just trying to stick it on the pin from 25 yards out. It’s like a common miss. In a way, it’s just a risky thing versus just a bump and run up there on the green and giving myself a putting chance.

That’s another big one in previous seasons. A big mistake that I’ve reflected on and I have since moved away is I used to have like a, I think it was like a 62 or 63-degree wedge. I would be five yards out from the green. It wasn’t quite a flop shot, but it was pretty close to it, and it was just super risky.

Think about that course awareness and think about what are some of the things that you’ve done in your game last season that you could improve on, but specifically to the course.

Think about from the tee box what’s something you’ve done. For me, for example, off the tee box, something that worked for me last season was understanding penalties better. I had a misunderstanding of the USGA rule for pace of play with penalties off the tee box.

What the USGA rule is, is if you hit your drive, let’s say 175–200 yards, and it goes out of bounds at like a white stake, the USGA says you don’t need to re-tee it up and hit again like the pros would. You can go down to where you went out, go straight across to the fairway, and you can drop two club lengths into the fairway, no closer to the hole, but you would take a two-stroke penalty.

My misinterpretation of this rule was I did that pretty much for any stake on the fairway. So whether it was red stake, yellow stake, white stake, or if I could just not find my ball, I would always take a two-stroke penalty.

So how I changed my strategy last year was I pretty much swing my driver as hard—I don’t want to say as hard as I can. I still try to have a smooth swing, but I’m not as worried about losing the ball, which is a lot better for me mentally. And I’m always aiming away from a white stake so that I’m trying to minimize that error where if I get it down there as far as I can, then best-case scenario, maybe 250. If I really hit it well, I can get up to 300. I’m being honest with all you guys listening. I’m not a long driver like I hope to be someday.

But if I’m aiming towards a red stake or something less risky than a white stake, and if I can’t find my ball, at least I’m dropping pretty close up to the hole for one-stroke penalty versus aiming at a white stake or something like that.

Now, if I look at a hole that has danger up both sides, then I might not take a driver just because it’s one of my clubs in my bag that I’m just not super confident in, and something I’m trying to work on over the off season.

So that’s just course awareness. That’s a lot of just reflection that you guys can think of. Like I said, start at the tee box. Think about how if you really just had a second to sit down and imagine the course in front of you. No pressure of taking a swing. No pressure of people behind you. No pressure of keeping up your pace. Nothing like that. Sit on the tee box in your mind and envision it and think, okay, I’m aware of the course. What sort of decisions would I make differently than what you typically would have or the same, because we’ve all made good decisions as well.

So skill number one is the course awareness.

Skill number two is tempo management. I think this is really important because most people aren’t swinging as often right now, and I think practicing your tempo is a really easy thing that people can do in the off season, whether you have the space or not.

Winter is definitely where that tempo disappears really easily. The tempo is something that you just have to ingrain in your mind over and over and over again. The swing tempo, it’s not my strongest suit, but my putting tempo I think is really, really strong. I think it’s actually a good example, I hope, for the listeners.

And it’s something I don’t even think about anymore, but I’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but I’ll go over it again real quickly. Every putt I have, I have a nice tempo to my whole routine. I go up to the ball. I do three practice swings with my putter. And then I go up and I putt. If I do four practice swings or two, it always throws me off. And that pattern is something I established probably more than five years ago, that tempo.

And that’s something that I want to do with my full swing as well. And it can be practiced in small spaces. So depending on the space you have. Let’s say you don’t even have a swing, a full club, you can get like a short weighted club, and there are practice aids or something like that. Try to get something that can mimic the weight of a club, and then you can take your tempo swing.

This is something you guys could practice pretty much every single day for five minutes. Just practice a tempo. Practice a routine. It’s great because since you are indoors, you’re not hitting a ball, you can’t really see where the ball is going. It’s good because it’s getting your mind to focus just on that tempo.

If you have a space that you could do it with a full club, for example, at one point I had a space in my apartment. It had like eight foot ceilings, so normal height ceilings, but I was able to get a junior club. It was like a junior wedge, and I was able to do full swings with that junior wedge. I would hit little tiny bean bag golf balls just into the side of the wall. I’m sure my neighbors loved it.

At the time I wasn’t practicing it for tempo or tempo management, but I think that would be a really good thing for me to do.

In my new house that I just moved into, in the basement I have nine foot ceilings or nine and a half foot ceilings. I actually think I have enough space that I might be able to do a full swing, but something I’m going to do is this tempo management, because I think about when I’ve played my best golf, I just feel like my golf swing is so smooth. It’s just like anything. It can be practiced, and I think it’s just a small thing that everyone can do during the winter.

So number three is just your smart scoring decisions. This is mostly just mental work. So winter is great for thinking about how you can make smarter scoring decisions. It’s a really good time to just reflect on scoring tendencies. Try to identify where your bad decisions came from this season, whether it’s ego, pressure, or impatience.

I think for me, if I reflected on where my bad decisions come from, I think pressure and anxiety would cause, kind of back to the old one, is just having bad tempo. But then that would make me have some bad decisions where I would just not make smart golf decisions if I felt the pressure.

I was thinking more so about like, oh, I need to keep this ball in bounds, or oh, I need to make a good swing here, or just don’t shank it, instead of making a decision like, oh, I want the ball to go here, or I want to avoid this trap on the right. Something like that. It’s just a mindset difference. So for me, I think the pressure at times is even self-imposed.

And then I think every once in a while you get that golfer up behind you that’s just basically hitting on you. That always makes me hit kind of a bad shot. So those are just some of my areas that I’ve identified that have caused bad decisions, and something I’ll work on going into next season.

Something that’s really interesting is that most scoring mistakes happen emotionally. It’s not technically. I think most of us have it in us to shoot in the low 80s, even high 70s, no matter how long of a hitter you are, because if you’re just playing a normal public course, you might be playing like 5500 yards, 6000 from the whites. That’s a very scoreable range, no matter your distance.

If you play like a 5800-yard course, your average tee shot could be just over 200 yards on a par 5 or a par 4, and you would still have a nice 100-yard wedge or so into the green.

But thinking about these scoring decisions—this is something you can go into YouTube as well. Watch the videos of, I think, Golf Digest puts them out. They put out really good videos on just golf statistics. It really helps you understand your game more. That’s perfect for wintertime.

I think one of the riskier things that I’ve done in my scoring, and something I’ve been trying to improve on, is understanding my shot dispersion. It’s really like a question of where is my miss rather than where do I want to go, and trying to get that shot thought down before going into a green or something like that.

So when I’m looking at a green, if I see the pin, let’s make it simple. Pin’s in the center. There’s a bunker off to the right of the green and rough off to the left of the green. I might have thought in the past, okay, I’m just going to go for the pin because I have the widest margin of error to be on the green left and right.

But that’s not necessarily true, because if you widen that margin out even further to include the rough and the sand trap, then really I’m going to go a little bit to the left of the pin. Because if I go too far left, I’ll just be in the rough, which is going to be an easier shot at most courses into the flag rather than the sand.

But it’s all about your shot dispersion as well. I know that when I’m on a simulator, for some reason I’m drawing a lot more aggressively than I typically would. So if I’m on a simulator, I’ll aim 10–15 yards to the right just to make sure my ball gets there. Now, I don’t do that normally on a course, but at least the simulator I play on every once in a while, it seems like that is a tendency.

So simulator is obviously not like a great example, but it does show the point that just think about your tendencies. If you tend to miss right, you want to aim more to the left.

So those are some of the practical winter takeaways I think you guys can all work on.

So if we recap it here, skill one is just course awareness. It’s the understanding of your past rounds and how you can visualize each hole. Skill two is something you can actually practice throughout the off season. I would recommend doing this like every single day for five or 10 minutes. It’s just your tempo. Getting that down, because if you can get a nice smooth tempo down going into the next spring, you’re going to be so much better than you are today.

Skill three would be the smarter scoring decisions. It’s similar to the course awareness one, but instead of thinking about, okay, how can I make decisions differently based off the course, you’re thinking more so, how can I just make better golf decisions period?

So those are the three skills I think we can work on in the off season.

I think for me, out of those three, the biggest one that I really want to work on is the tempo. That’s something I think I can work on. I like having something practical I can do every single day, and that’s something I can really easily do for five or ten minutes. And I just know that whenever I play my best golf, it is always when I have like a smooth swing, and I always putt pretty well, and I think it’s because I have that tempo and that rhythm down, and I would love to try to establish that in my swing this off season.

So I think that’s one of the things that I’m going to personally focus on.

And that’s it. That’s probably the main things that I was thinking about talking about for this podcast.

I guess just some updates. I just moved from my apartment into a home. It has a really large basement. So of course I have an idea for a golf simulator. If I do the golf simulator, I think I’m going to record it, kind of like building it and putting it on YouTube.

I also think I would probably do it in stages. So I’ll start with something simple, like a net and maybe just a hitting mat. I already have one of those Garmin R10 or maybe R11, one of those Garmin golf simulators. It was like $600 off Amazon. It was pretty much the cheapest one I could find that was rated pretty well. So I’m hoping to put that to pretty good use this off season.

I really haven’t used it much. I think I’ve used it maybe two or three times. I got it for my birthday two years ago. I just happened that my old apartment had a golf sim, so I just didn’t need to use it a ton. But now that I’m in a house, I have an opportunity to use it.

So I would love to hear about your winter goals. Probably leave it as a comment. I’ll try to—this podcast, I’ll just be honest, it gets distributed to so many different podcasting platforms, so I don’t always see comments and things that are left for this podcast. But if you go to birdieboard.golf, there’s a contact form on there.

I would love for you to just share any winter goals you may have because it might help spark ideas of what I can share on the podcast for the golfers. Because right now, with the golf season pretty much over, I am trying to keep the podcast focused on what you guys can do during the winter because most of us don’t live in a place like Florida.

And at least for me, usually November comes and I’m like, okay, I’m done with golf for a couple of months. But I still love golf deep down. I still love the idea of golf. Part of me is happy to have the rest. But whenever I get to the spring, I’m like, man, I wish I did a little bit of something. Or like, what’s a good balance?

And I hope that this podcast, just listening to it, would help kind of fill that a little bit during the off season of staying golf ready. Even if it’s not fully practicing, just keeping it on your mind a little bit, keeping your thought patterns around it. And I’m hoping that that will help everyone listening, including myself, be stronger into the next golf season.

So that’s it for this episode of Birdie Board. Thanks for listening, everyone.

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