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My name is Jake Marriott and I will be a Junior at Georgia Regents University (formerly Augusta State). I have had a decent college career so far qualifying for every event this past year with 6 top 20 finishes and a 73 scoring average. I plan on eventually trying to play golf professionally and I know my ball striking needs to be better and more consistent to do so. I look forward to listening to your advice! Thank you for your time.
You would expect from Jake’s scoring average that he has a very good golf swing, and as you look at the first swings of the video you can see that he does. It is powerful and aggressive and has what appears to be great form. It’s the type of swing that a lot of people would say “don’t mess with it, it’s good enough. Just be confident and go play golf shot and not golf swing”. Of course, these people don’t understand that the speed of a good swing doesn’t allow the viewer to see anything that’s really going on during the motion except the general notion that it looks good and therefore if the player doesn’t hit the ball well it must be some kind of mental issue or a lack of confidence. In Jake’s case the slow motion video shows the problem very clearly: his lower body lacks the lateral drive to go along with his rotation, so to produce the speed he gets he has to pull his arms instead of having the body pull them, which results in his left arm bending and becoming disconnected from his chest. I would suspect that a 3D analysis would show a sequence problem with the arms accelerating past the hips, and sequence problems make the consistent squaring of the clubface difficult, especially at high speeds. Here I give Jake a few set up suggestions and then some things to work on in his practice to promote more lateral hip movement, which will then put more drag on the muscles of lower back and his left side so that his left arm can be pulled into the downswing and retain its radius better.
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