Trying To Golf Like a Professional Stock Picker

Ever wonder why your golf scores look like the monthly trend charts for the Dow Jones Industrial?  Why can’t you build any consistency into your game?

Admittedly, it’s early in the 2014 season and my scores to date (92, 77, 78, 83) are a small sample size, but the inconsistency has me concerned.  I thought to stabilize and hopefully see steady improvement from week-to-week, I’d rethink my approach to work more like a professional trader on Wall Street.  In an attempt to remove the impact of market fluctuations on my portfolio, I will employ some technical analysis, which simply defined is using the examination of critical pieces of past performance data in an attempt to predict future behavior.  In my case, I’m going to attempt to drive performance instead of predict it.  Good luck to me.

Tomorrow, I play at Poolesville, the site of the ugly opening day debacle.  I reviewed performance notes I’ve kept on all the rounds played at Poolesville since 2010 and picked up three trends.

1. Ball striking was inconsistent especially off the tee which repeatedly had me playing out of trouble, and didn’t improve until mid to late round when I benched my driver.  Last week I wrote about the great experiment I was considering with driver benching on par-5 holes, and it starts tomorrow.  Driver is out of the bag and replaced with a 5WD.
2. On good ball striking days, I noticed a tight connection between arms and torso and my pre-round full swing practice usually included focus on making a shorter back swing.  When I try to make too full of a turn, my arms continue back after my shoulder turn is complete causing me to come up and out of my spine angle and hit loose shots.  Today’s practice will be a bucket full of 3/4 pitching wedges to get the feel of a tight connection.
3. Poolesville’s greens are undulating and fast.  When I opened my stance with the putter somehow my feel for distance greatly improved and I putted well.  Not sure why this was the case but an open stance is in the game plan.

After reviewing data from Poolesville, what irks me is that I usually found solutions (adjustments) late in my rounds after my mistakes had impacted my score.  Hopefully by adding in what’s worked during past practice and play, before I start, I’ll have a more enjoyable experience.  Maybe tomorrow is the start of a long bull run and a look at more opportunities from the fairway!  Anyone ever tried this approach out there?