Are golf lessons worth it? Yes they are.. and here’s why!

To celebrate UK Coaching week we put together an expert panel of PGA Professionals - (left to right) Sarah Bennett, Chris Ryan and Joe Feather - to discuss the value of coaching and lessons to golfers of all abilities.

For those that have never had a golf lesson, what exactly happens?

Joe Feather:
As PGA pros we’d all like that answer to be as simple as possible. You come for a golf lesson and you leave as a better golfer. That’s all we are focused on trying to achieve. The difficulty when it comes to lessons is that the phrase ‘getting better’ is going to mean something different for everybody. Better doesn’t only mean lower scores!

Sarah Bennett:
For me, the important bit is before you get to the golf lesson. I like to make my clients at ease during that initial communication process. I do lots of questioning beforehand, which gives me an idea of how I might pitch my lesson, which is really important. In the actual lesson I get the pupil to warm up by hitting a few short wedges, which as we know as PGA pros, gives us an awful lot of information before we actually start the session. Within the first five minutes I’m pretty sure of the areas that I can help my client to improve on.

Q: Why do you think that golfers are often reluctant to get a golf lesson?

Joe Feather:
There’s still the stigma that the coach is going to pull your swing apart and it’s going to take six months of poor golf before you eventually get to where you want to get to – but it’s not like that at all. If you’re a golfer who doesn’t want their swing overhauled then you just communicate that to your coach. Tell them if you haven’t got a huge amount of time to commit to the learning, that maybe you are more of a weekend or recreational golfer but you have a shot which you struggle with on the golf course which is making the game less fun. If I had something wrong with my car, I wouldn’t just drop it off into the garage and walk away, I’d explain to them what’s wrong, what I want to do. It’s almost having that bit of confidence that as a player you can dictate a little bit of what’s covered in the lesson.

Q: How do we get rid of that stigma around lessons?

Sarah Bennett:
I think the important thing here is really, as we all know as PGA professionals, we don’t just change something to be cosmetic. It is key that we explain why we are doing something. That’s so, so important. There’s no point just changing something, we have to say why. I think that adds to the confidence level. For me, when a client comes to a session, they are generally quite low on confidence, their mind is like a scrambled egg. There is so much going on there. It’s our ability to unravel that, to just give them one focal point, to improve that ball strike or ball flight in that 30-minute session and then instill confidence, so they can have an amazing experience.

There seems to be a feeling amongst club golfers that lessons are only for when you are struggling with your game. Is that true?

Chris Ryan:
No, but I think you will meet a lot of your clients for the first time when they are struggling. That’s the nature of the business. That’s our opportunity to build that trusted relationship. Most clients will come in with a problem, like: “I’m just struggling with my driver but my chipping and putting is OK.” People don’t lose a ball when they are putting, well hopefully not! There’s usually some easy gains to be made there. Coming back to the point about the reluctance to take golf lessons, I think with golf being an individual sport and very much a game of mastering your own technique and bettering yourself, people get a kick out of achieving it themselves. How we market ourselves and brand ourselves as a coach should be as someone who is helping their journey of self-discovery, allowing them to master their games with our help.

Is the way you teach a 20-handicap different to a single-figure player?

Joe Feather:
In some respects yes. When you meet a new customer you must spend a lot of time getting to know them. You have a chat and make them feel as comfortable as possible. I like to go to the gym but I find it quite a daunting place to go. I treat a new golf customer like that. We have to empathise with them, make them feel as comfortable as possible. We question them about their game and spend time assessing what they want to get out of the session. I think that sometimes it’s easy for us to jump in with what we see, but I think that listening to the customer and seeing what that person wants to get out of their golf is really important. For a plus handicapper, 18-handicapper or a beginner, those things are going to be totally different. So it’s about talking to them, setting some goals in what they want to achieve and then starting to put a plan in place of how you are going to go about it. Golf is an individual sport and every one of those people through your lesson door is an individual. It’s our job to make them feel as comfortable as possible and let them know that we are here to help them achieve their goals.

How important is it to get out on the course if possible?

Sarah Bennett:
I’m quite fortunate to be able to jump on a golf course frequently, so for me as a former player myself, I understand the importance of actually doing the lesson on the course. To be honest, when I meet a client for the first time I generally take them out on the course, so it gives me a complete picture of their game straight away. We all know that if they say they are slicing the ball, we need to see it. So straight away we can see the areas that they would like to improve on. Out on the course, with just some simple questioning, they can actually understand and work it out themselves. For me, I’m not a coach who just stands on that range watching them hit balls for an hour. I’m actually incorporating everything, all areas of the game, even the simple mental stuff, shot selection and so on - the things we can forget if we don’t have access to a course straight away. I generally use this approach rather than just hitting balls on the range.

Speaking of the mental side – sometimes it can be hard for a new golfer to hit balls in front of a PGA Pro. How would you deal with that side of things?

Sarah Bennett:
The important thing from me is building confidence levels. I do a lot of work on building a pre-shot routine but also, importantly, a post-shot routine. People forget that. After we’ve hit a bad shot we tend to carry that forward. Some say just forget it and move on but it’s not quite as simple as that, as we know. There’s lot of on-course situations that I will coach for that player and just try to get them to draw out their confidence and work on those levels, which then we can take back to practise. It’s a whole bubble of improvement. We don’t just hit balls on the range and off we go. I say to my clients, hit 25 balls and let every ball count. Because you know that’s going to be constructive practise. Then they can take that constructively to the course, hopefully a lot more successfully than if they are just hitting ball after ball.

That’s a really important message to get across to new golfers… how do you transfer the skills that you can demonstrate on the driving range to the golf course?

Chris Ryan:
A lot of it is little bit of that is just managing expectations. If I go on the driving range and pull out a 7-iron I might hit a couple left, but then five or six balls later figure out a way of that going straight. I then might hit 20 7-irons that are really straight and I suddenly leave that range feeling like I’ve hit the ball really well. But that’s not real golf. On the golf course you have to be able to produce the skill every 10 minutes or so, but we don’t practise that. We go on the practice green and we hit the same putt over and over again. We think that we are putting really well and then we go out on the golf course and can’t do it. There’s a mental block. So as coaches we help our pupils practise in a way that reflects the course. I say to people when you get your bucket of balls place it five paces away from you. It forces you to hit a ball, then walk away from it to get another club, change the target, change the club. Just start to practise in a way that actually replicates how the game is played.

What makes the ideal student?

Joe Feather:
It doesn’t really exist. Everyone is a different person. But I suppose the ideal student is someone who understands themselves as a person and how they react to things both positive and negative. How they motivate themselves as well. As you build that relationship with a customer you start to pick up on how they tick. Their body language after a good shot, a bad shot, or a hole. You understand whether they need to change the way they react to it or whether you roll with it and encourage certain behaviours. An ideal student is someone who is willing to push themselves out of the comfort zone, because we never really fully drill in new technique or change of mentality unless we are belligerent with it and stick with it. Golf is a true game. Everyone hits bad shots. It’s your ability to say, OK, I’m seeing really positive stuff out of the good shots with my new technique, rather than thinking I’ve hit a bad shot I’m going to just go back to doing it wrong again. That’s our role as a coach, to use our expertise to instill that trust in the pathway that we’ve set out for them and the process that we’ve put in place to go through with those marginal, incremental improvements in technique. It’s a combination of those two things really, their ability to manage themselves emotionally and not react negatively to bad stuff and to also really trust the coaches input and what we have put in place. 

Are there any pupils that’s you’re really proud of?

Joe Feather:
I can’t single people out really with regards to their success stories. Every golfer we work with is on their own journey and that’s part of our job. The better players I work with mean as much to me as a new beginner getting their first handicap. From my point of view, it’s all relative to that individual. As coaches we get a massive kick out of every single person we work with just enjoying the game and getting that little bit better.

Chris Ryan:
Joe is exactly right there. I started with a player who didn’t even have a set of clubs. He came in and I was the first person that he spoke to in the academy. He said: “I’ll warn you, when I do something I’m all-in.” He practiced every day and was really dedicated. I managed to get his handicap down to two or three. I would never take the credit for his success, as it was clearly all down to him… but it was nice to have that whole journey from raw beginner down to a two handicap.

Sarah Bennett:
We’ve all had lots of success stories as coaches, but I always just come back to what is our role? Every player who visits PGA Play or books a lesson direct is wanting to play the game better and wanting to improve – so every player is an opportunity to be another success story.