Look closely at how any of us play golf and you’ll find traces of where we play, too. Example: My home course is tight and has small greens, which I miss with enough frequency that it’s made me a versatile chipper. Friends who play golf courses with steep bunkers tend to be better out of the sand, and if you play enough on an exposed, treeless layout, you might be better in the wind.
Some of this just happens randomly over time, yet one choice arises virtually every time we play:
Which tee box will make you a better player? It’s possible you haven’t considered why this matters.
According to Golf Digest Best in State teacher Jeff Ritter, one way to think about tee boxes is like a video game setting that starts off at an easy level, and gives the player a chance to progress.
“The game sees that as a demonstration of skill, and then rewards you by allowing you to move to another level where the game moves faster and becomes more challenging,” Ritter says. “If every video game started at the highest level, the game would be over the moment it started. “
The mistake most golfers make is they insert themselves into the wrong level of the game. By playing a more difficult yardage of a golf course, they’re missing what the golf coach Darren May has described as the “learning sweet spot,” which states that a task that is the right level of challenging is when we absorb the most.
The key element is an appropriate amount of failure. As outlined for a story in Golf Digest earlier this year, May usually applies this philosophy to developing practice sessions for competitive players, including Keegan Bradley and Justin Thomas. But for recreational players like me, competing and practicing are often intertwined. If we want to get better while we play, we need to reconsider the environment we create across 18 holes.
“You want to create meaningful tasks, but they can only be meaningful if they’re positioned in a spot where you are capable of doing it,” May says. “But if it’s a 100 percent success, and the task is way too easy, there’s no learning there either. So you’re looking for the middle ground.”
More Low Net
Golf Digest Logo How playing forward tees makes you better
Golf Digest Logo Never throw a golf club, except . . .
Golf Digest Logo We’ve been practicing all wrong
The problem with playing golf courses that are consistently too tough, experts say, is they tend to make us swing with trepidation. I know the feeling. Whenever I play from too far back, there’s usually a point when I’m just trying to hang on. Already not very long off the tee, I now have to drive it perfectly, and that strain creeps through the rest of my bag. When it comes to learning about my swing, my system is overloaded.
“Seventy percent of the shots we play are inside 100 yards, so the further you get back, the more exhausted you are by the time you get to a 100 yards, and now you’re just frustrated,” says Golf Digest 50 Best Teacher Will Robins.
/content/dam/images/golfdigest/fullset/2024/teebox.png
Although there are benefits to playing courses all the way up—especially with younger players learning how to score—just playing the right yardage is helpful. Ritter and Robins both referenced a popular formula of taking your typical 5-iron distance and multiplying it by 36. For me, that works out to 6,300 yards, which is precisely the yardage I play at my home course. At no point would I call that easy, but it’s at least manageable enough that I’m not out of my depth.
“There is nothing about the game that is ever ‘too easy’ to learn or that can be overlooked,” Ritter says.
One last way to look at this is to think of yardage as weights on a barbell. We know the way to grow a muscle is to put it under more strain. But as trainers say, when it comes at the expense of form, you won’t get anywhere. First learn to squat properly with just the bar, and then you start adding plates on either side. The same thinking might be helpful the next time you pick a tee box.
“The more competent you get, the more confident you are, because then you’re like, ‘Yeah, I can do this,’” Robins says. “Meanwhile, the less competent you are, the less confident, so there’s a downward spiral. I would be telling everybody that they should be playing shorter courses until they shoot better scores.”
This article first appeared in Low Net, a Golf Digest+ exclusive newsletter written for the average golfer, by an average golfer. Have a topic you want me to explore? Send me an email and I’ll do my best to dive in.
Read the full article here
