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If you have watched my previous posts working with Derek you will find that, like with most good players, you end up working on the same things most of the time. Every player has tendencies that they don’t particularly like, and when they compete a lot it is hard to continue to address the issues as it feels as though the thought process on the course can be too mechanical. Derek doesn’t like to look at his swing during events, and thus it usually happens that when he gets to see me, either in Florida or here in Maryland, that there has been a good amount of time where he has been thinking and trying to feel what we have been working on but doesn’t really know whether he is doing what he is visualizing. There is a healthy debate to be had regarding the way players utilize instruction when they compete, but every player must find their own balance of thinking and not thinking when it comes to swing mechanics. Derek is seeing greater success on the Latin American Tour, and needs a good finish or two to move into the top 20 money winners, which would exempt him from the first stage of Web.Com Q-School. Since I work for a living and play competitively in my off time I am not able to drill new thoughts into my swing until they are more automatic, so throughout my career I have chosen to look at my swing before, during and after events. When I don’t do that I find myself reverting to habits that are hard to break, and it takes constant attention for me to improve even a little bit. In Derek’s case, he tends to have too much movement in his trigger, and by the time he gets to transition he has overused his right arm and shoulder enough to have the shaft off plane and across the line at the top, which makes the rest of his swing more complicated. He has been improving steadily, however, and each time we have a session like this where we go back over how the same thoughts can make his swing simpler and function more efficiently I believe that his practice will be more fine-tuned and his ball striking performance will get even better. You will also be struck at how quickly a player of Derek’s caliber can incorporate suggestions and get his swing to look much different, and better, in a short period of time.
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