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Amelie is a 16-year-old sophomore playing for her high school golf team and hoping to improve enough to earn a golf scholarship to college. I first noticed her practicing diligently on the range at Osprey Point where I teach, and noted to a friend that she evidenced an issue that I see constantly with juniors who are thinly built, that of over-turning the right arm and shoulder in the backswing. In Amelie’s case (as you will see) both her hands were on the target side of her head at the top, and the amount of turn was bending her spine to the left and pushing her ribcage out to the right, which to me means weakness in the muscles in what people call the “core”. The position she had to recover from in the downswing left her with no way to get her right upper arm far enough forward to do anything but have an extreme “throw” type release, and her problem was hitting the ball fat and thin, which was not surprising. I could see that this would be a process that would probably take a while to remedy, so I started in with stop and go drills, then moved to impact drills, after which I tried to connect the dots in the full swing. When players have never hit a ball with their hands forward leaning the shaft the feeling is so different that I never expect the change to take hold immediately, so we will keep after it in the coming lessons.
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