You probably started playing golf for fun, to be more social, to just hang out with another fellow golfer you like and then it happened, you got hooked to playing golf. You hit enough satisfying shots that the game got in your blood, you started caring about your score and how you performed, and now you want to break 100. Well, you are in the right place to learn how to break 100.
Golf is Hard, Make it Easy
In baseball, you can make over 10 million dollars a year just by throwing a ball, you can be bad at hitting it. When you are playing in the American League, you don’t even have to try. In football, you can block, tackle, catch or throw and no one expects you to do more than any of those things. In basketball, you can have an amazing career by just standing outside the 3-point line and making jump shots. However, in golf, you need to master plenty of skills to be good like driving, putting, iron play, chipping, pitching, etc. But there’s one secret that no one tells you which is you don’t have to master any of those skills in order to break 100. The first step to breaking 100 is paring down the list of skills to the ones that are essential to your current goal.
Skills You Will Need
1. Putting – Putting is unavoidable, you need to be a skilled putter. Thankfully, this is the easiest skill to learn in golf, from physical standpoint.
2. Mid-short iron swing – You need to be able to move the ball around the course, and the 7-iron is going to be your best bet for that. You will need to learn this to be reasonably accurate and consistent with your irons from 7 through PW.
3. Simple pitch and chip – You are going to miss greens so you will need a way to get the ball on the green from inside 100 yards.
You don’t need any long irons, hybrids, fairway woods, flop shots, or most of all, a driver. For high handicap players, the driver adds more strokes than it saves by a huge portion. Hitting driver be fun sometimes but you will notice that these tips are not for having fun but rather breaking 100 which is fun all the time.
Tips
The first decision you are going to make that will help you break 100 is choosing an appropriate set of tees. There is no reason why you or someone shooting over 100 should play more than 6500 yards, that’s even pushing it. Playing shorter tees will take the pressure off your game and allow you to hit more good shots. There’s plenty of time to play the longer tees when you’re consistently shooting in the 90’s or 80’s. Once you’re on the course, the things that you need to focus on are keeping the ball in play avoiding unnecessary risk and hitting the ball to the center of the green.
Keep the Ball In Play
By leaving everything longer than a 7-iron at home, you’ve taken a huge step towards keeping the ball in play. Another key point is not over-swinging, don’t just stand on the tee and try to hit your 7-iron 250 yards. If your 7-iron goes 140 yards, don’t even try to hit the green when you are 160 yards out. Swing within yourself and keep the ball in play.
Avoid Unnecessary Risk
Even with nothing longer than a 7-iron, it’s very likely that you will find some trouble at some point. That is ok, remember that there’s plenty of room for errors but the key is not repeating your mistakes. If you hit it into the trees, punch out. If there is a forced carry that you could only make if you hit your 7-iron perfectly, lay up. You can make bogeys and doubles and break 100. When you start making triples and quads, breaking 100 becomes more difficult.
Aim for the Center of the Green
Until you are putting, you should pretend that the flag doesn’t exist and hit the ball the center of the green. If you hit only a couple of green in regulation, you will nearly get a guaranteed score in the 90’s. Missing the green, even by a small margin, is strongly correlated with higher scores. Give yourself the widest margin for error when attacking the green by aiming for the center.
If you master these 3 skills that we have talked about here and you bring these 3 pieces to the course, you will be shooting in the 90’s in very little time and then you will be on your way to breaking 90.
