3 Buckets for Bad Shots
If you are a high to mid-handicap golfer trying to lower your scores, when reviewing your round, start placing your bad shots mentally into the following three buckets. By doing so, you’ll know what parts of your game you need to practice and focus on, and where the strokes are piling up. Is it all three buckets or just one? It’s a simple way to break down the harm to your scorecard and help you prioritize next steps.
Lost Balls
The first bucket is obvious. Losing the ball is a severe penalty. If you are losing a lot of balls, you can forget lower scores. If this bucket is full for you, start to think about WHY you lost each ball, and it can shed light on your game and mental approach. We all know friends who swing the driver hard with no control. 250+ yard drives in who knows what direction. These players might shift to working at the range on a stock cruising speed driver swing that is only 230 yards total with reliable dispersion. Some players lose balls because they don’t know their yardages per club, or they make course management errors. Examples might be hitting too much or too little club on an approach shot, resulting in a lost ball, or trying to drive the green on a short par 4 and plunking it into the pond. These are balls lost to mental mistakes and discipline. Some players lose balls because they can’t get the ball airborne consistently enough when they must carry it over hazards. These are balls lost due to a lack of ball strike consistency. Player X and Y can each lose 3 balls in the round, but for different reasons.
Severe Mishits
The second bucket is a catch-all for bad shots that are not lost balls or greenside short-game shots. I call these Severe mishits. This is by far the biggest bucket of bad shots for beginners and high handicappers. Severe mishits include all tops, shanks, fat shots, duffs, and skulls. A topped driver is a severe mishit. So is a duffed 45-yard pitch. If you hit an 8-iron 130 yards, and you catch your approach shot a little fat, and it’s 119 yards and a little right, that is NOT a severe mishit. You get the idea. Players with a lot of strokes in this bucket need to work on the fundamentals and shift their practice and goals to minimize severe mishits with balls on the ground.
Decent Short Game
This bucket includes your bad greenside chips and pitches, and your bad putts. Does it take you one or two chips to get onto the green? Does it take you 2 or 3 putts to get in the hole? I played nine holes last month with a student who started playing golf last season. After the round, we realized almost all his bad shots were from this short game bucket. For 8 of the 9 holes played, he was greenside in regulation. Meaning that for 8 of the 9 holes, he was either on the green in regulation or less than 10 yards from the green with a chance for an up and down. The scorecard did not reflect being that close to the hole in regulation for 8 of the 9 holes. As a takeaway, he knew his long game was in a good spot, and the next chunk of strokes to drop will be from the short game bucket. A good place to be!
If you start thinking about your game and your bad shots in terms of these 3 buckets, it can help you lay out a path and plan for what to work on to drop more strokes and lower your handicap.
