Putting alignment is so important, and Scott Tanguay of the Coastal Golf Academy at Whispering Pines Golf Course in Myrtle Beach, S.C. is here to show you a drill that will help reinforce it properly.
Scott Tanguay:
Hi, this is Scott Tanguay with the Coastal Golf Academy, right across the street from Myrtle Beach International Airport. Today, I want to talk to you about a little bit of a warm-up for your putting before you get out on the course. If you have a couple minutes, usually you see people maybe hit a couple balls. You're going to hit a lot of putts throughout the round, so try to get there and work on your speed control. Every course is a little different, so you want to get the speed for the day.
And then really, what's most important that I don't see a lot of people working on is just making sure you're aligned properly, whether that's your body, and especially the club head. What I’ve got here is very simple drill. You don't even have to hit it. Just take a stick, or another club is fine, and lay it down. And just try and put your face flush with the stick, because you'd be surprised. It seems easy. But a lot of times people have it maybe a little open, maybe a little closed. And then you're trying to make a five-footer. And if it's a little open or closed, then you're off on your line.
Before you start hitting putts, just make sure that day that you're seeing it right, that it looks square to you, because that's step one. Step two is making sure your stroke's good and making sure that you’ve got good speed. So what we have here is, we've got our ball obviously and a little stick. The idea is the putting stroke has a little bit of an arc to it, right? If you stand here and you try and force it back and forth on the stick, you're trying to play it straight back and through, the putter doesn't necessarily like that. It's got to have a little bit of an arc to it, kind of slightly in to slightly in.
So we feel like, okay, we've got our alignment for the day. Now you can use this. The idea being, you feel you come a little bit away from the stick, back to square and finish a little bit left instead of riding it so much. So you feel like you got your alignment. Now we can try and remember to just slightly avoid the stick. Try and pull the trigger. Oh, close.
And then you want to feel like you’ve got your speed down. Try and hit some lags, try and get some short ones. Thinking more about varying the length of your stroke, not necessarily hitting it harder for longer distance, or trying to ease up on it if it's shorter. So short putt, shorter more compact stroke. Thirty, 40-footer, we need a little bit more length on it. We're not necessarily going to stab at it.