Can someone learn golf online?

I wasn’t sure about the answer to this particular question pre lockdown, but I wanted to find out.  Marcus was my first victim. A likeable lad who plays his golf at the Te Puke Golf Club. It all started with Marcus sending me a photo of his ‘lockdown’ golf setup. He’d managed to construct a hitting net to pass the time and work on his game.  I said to Marcus, ‘send me a video of your swing’, thereafter ensued much communication backwards and forwards.

Marcus had quite a few issues, a poor setup and an out-to-in swing path. All of which was easily visible from the video footage he had sent from his cellphone. After 18 plus years coaching golf, my eyes quickly detect the faults. I’m sure it’s very common across experts in different industries. Not that I profess to be an expert!

I did have some technical difficulties with sending videos through messenger but quickly worked out that simply uploading the video to YouTube and sharing as a private link was the easiest option.  Where the message could easily have been interpreted badly I turned my instruction into a video, rather than a bunch of instructions in a text message.

We got his setup position sorted as quickly as possible, Marcus was pretty keen to get things moving and he had multiple questions about his swing.  It naturally evolved that I would give him his ‘homework’, then he’d rip into exectuting the changes, often spending hours working on it before reporting back the next morning with the ‘evidence’ and his feedback in how it was feeling.  Sometimes though, I had to slow him down.  One step at a time.

My belief, and that of most golf pros is that you can’t make a good swing with a poor setup. Once I was happy with the setup we moved on to the swing.  A simple drill helped to fix his swing path quite quickly and his angle of attack which was very steep was now much more shallow.  Happy coach and happy student.

What did I learn? It isn’t hard to teach remotely. Get the tech side of it sorted and communicate through videos as much as possible.  It can be a little dis-jointed at times with going backwards and forwards unlike a 30 minute lesson which has a definitive start and end point. Overall though, a positive experience for both player and coach, great results can be achieved.
Scott Pickett – Golf 360