It’s a whole other ball game.
September 1st 2019 marks the day I said goodbye to my amateur status forever. Letting the idea of not playing any of the ILGU championships or club competitions again was a tough pill to swallow. However, the idea of golf becoming a large aspect of my work life excited me. I didn’t really know what to expect, and I am definitely still figuring out how things work on the professional side of the game, but one thing is for definite; playing golf and coaching golf are two completely different things.
I suppose the real wake-up call came with the academic work load and commitment that the PGA course sets out for their trainees. I didn’t realise the amount of work, and the diversity of such work, that Professional golfers undertake. From personal branding to Newton’s law of motions, this course will weed out the golf nerds.
As a player, I foolishly believed that I knew a lot about golf and the swing.
Ohhh how foolish.
Don’t get me wrong, I do know a lot about golf, but I didn’t realise how much more my coaches knew. I used to come out of lessons thinking that the changes I needed to make were easy and manageable. Sometimes I believed that the advice I was getting was too easy; there had to be more. But now that I’m learning about how to coach people, I’m beginning to appreciate that the art of coaching lies in the ability to give simple, but effective tips.
A player doesn’t need to understand the depths of physics to be able to play. A coach on the other hand, is likely to find this depth useful. Since it allows them to understand how subtle changes in a player’s swing or game can impact the ball flight or overall performance.
I used to be a tricky player to coach because I always wanted to know why my coach was changing things, and why they weren’t changing other parts of my game. On reflection I can recognise that I was probably a little too curious as a player, because I didn’t need to know why. I just needed to know what to change and how to do it. The ability to filter out unnecessary information and translate the most relevant information for a specific player is the main task of a coach. That’s a simple idea to grasp but maybe not the easiest task to implement.
As the saying goes, to be a good teacher you must “understand something in its complexity in order to be able to explain it in its simplicity”. I think it was Einstein who said that if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. I am only at the beginning of this journey, but seeing the game from the reversed perspective has been truly eye-opening.
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