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Scott is from California but had a wedding to attend in the DC area so he decided to stop in and spend some time with me at Woodmont. We had 3 hours to work on Monday, then 3 more on Tuesday morning, and I feel like we got a lot accomplished, as I think you will see.
The first thing that occurred to me is that Scott has a nice, aggressive looking action that to the eye seems under control and manageable. I was surprised when he told me that he sometimes gets to the point where he has no idea which way the ball was going to go. As usual, however, a closer look, with slow motion analysis and lines to indicate the starting conditions we can see why that might happen. Scott’s takeaway has the club moving under plane and with the face closed, a pattern that comes up quite often when the address position is taken with the arms as tight as Scott has them. His left wrist flattens early and remains that way at the top, and the approach to impact ends up coming in with hands high and the clubface closed as his head backs up to keep the club coming from the inside.
I ask Scott to start with the arms softer (more bent) at address and the hands higher (the grip pointing toward the belt buckle), then to use the upper trunk more completely in the takeaway action, engaging the back muscles all the way down to the waist to get an earlier winding of the shoulders and trunk. We worked on getting the shaft to move up the initial shaft plane, and concentrated on getting the toe of the club to point more up at shaft parallel to get the face more open throughout the backswing.
On the second day we saw some nice general improvement, and then concentrated on the clubface opening up at the top and in transition so that he could feel comfortable releasing more to the left. You will see in Scott’s last swing that we were able to get a fairly complete pattern change, and now we will keep an eye on it over the next few months to see how he is able to work on it and take it out to the course.
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