Lesson of the Week: Jeremy Wells

Jeremy has been a solid player for William and Mary College in Williamsburg, Va., and has one more semester before graduating and turning professional. He showed some real promise last summer by reaching the semi-finals of the Virginia State Amateur (losing to a 60- foot putt on the 18th hole) and finishing 5th in the Virginia State Open. He showed he could go low by shooting 16 under for 4 days at the Eastern Amateur, and has finished well in a number of college events. Jeremy enjoys working on his golf swing, and since being introduced to the website (and subsequently to me) by his friend and another of my students, Daryl Chappell, he has improved his knowledge of the swing in general and, as you can see here, has vastly improved his own swing mechanics.
 
Jeremy is a medium sized guy, yet has the ability to really move the club and put a hard strike on the ball. He has always suffered from a weak approach to impact, and thus has tended to move his entire body forward in transition in order to lean the club forward enough to avoid hitting the ball fat. In this lesson we made tremendous progress with his sequencing, and for the first time we are getting more push from the ground (and lateral movement) and less lean from the upper body. This is a hallmark of almost every great ball striker you can name, and needless to say Jeremy was excited to see this evidenced in his own swing. The interesting thing is that we started the lesson by raising his hands at address, keeping the clubhead lower to the ground in the takeaway, and increasing the amount of upper trunk coil early in the backswing, the goal being to get the shoulders to 90 degrees turned by the time the left arm reached parallel to the ground. This all served to help load his weight down into the right leg, from where he could pretty much automatically push off better from the ground. Of course, if there is good use of the ground in transition any tendency to lean the upper body to shift weight will be lessened, and you can see the result here. Correspondingly, as his sequence improved, so did the direction of his hand movement in transition as well as the shallowing of his shaft. All in all, quite a successful session.