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First Tee Life Skills:

Staying Cool

You’re about to take your shot. You pick your target, set up to the ball, swing your club, and you miss. What happens now? You want to have fun and do your best, and sometimes, in order to play your best, you have to choose how to respond when facing challenging or frustrating situations.

The good news is that you're in control! How you choose to respond is up to you! Will you learn from the challenge or get frustrated and give up? 

First Tee has a tip called the 4Rs to help players use good judgment and stay cool on and off the golf course whether things go your way or not. In this lesson, you are going to focus specifically on the first 2Rs: Relax and Replay.

When specifically applied to the game of golf, you can use these Rs to help you start to develop your post-shot routine, which is what you think, say, or do immediately after hitting the ball. All of our shots won’t be perfect or even good, but you can remember a few tips to help you use good judgment and respond in a way that is helpful. 

First, you want to Relax! Take a couple deep breaths and shake off the shot. You can count slowly to yourself while breathing to help you let go of any frustration you might feel in the moment.

Next, you want to Replay what happened in your mind. What did you want to happen? What actually happened? Do they match? If so, awesome! Take a few seconds to enjoy what you did well and store it in your memory so you can try to do it again in the future. If you did not have the outcome you hoped for, replay that shot for just a second in your mind and think about what you might do differently next time and what you can learn from your shot today. 

SNEDS After School

The After School with Series on the Sneds Tour consists of 9-hole tournaments on Thursday afternoons in the Spring and Fall. The tournaments are open to boys and girls ages 8-16. Tee times start between 3:30-4:00pm in all regions across the state.

First Tee Fundamentals:

Direction at Contact

In order to control the direction of your shot, you must learn to square the club face at impact. When we line up to the ball, we generally point to club face in the direction we want to hit it. Somewhere during the swing, we often lose control of the face and end up hitting it somewhere else.

Much of this is a result of the process of the golf swing. When we take the club back, the club face should not be pointing at the target. At hip level, the face should be about 90 degrees right of the target. At the top of the backswing, the face should be pointing toward the sky. On the way down to impact, we need to retrace those positions.

Any deviation from the correct club face direction during the swing can cause problems, which is one reason that golf is a difficult sport. One of the best ways to learn proper positions is to take them in sections, and repeat many times. Take a look at the positions below. Begin by matching each one in order on the backswing, then retracing them on the downswing.

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