Like all golf shots, a tee shot has a start line, trajectory (shape & height), a landing area and a target. You can find out how big YOUR PERSONAL targets are by doing your Aussie Rules Stroke Play drills in practice.
You can download a copy of the Aussie Rules Stroke Play scorecard by going to the Drills tab of this website. If you remember, the Skills Test that you did on Monday, Tuesday and Saturday of the camp at Sentosa was based on Aussie Rules Golf. For your tee shots, the target size is the 200m target size - 20m for the 10 point area, and 10m either side for the 5 point areas. In other words we are saying that the overall target size you should be aiming to hit when you are attempting to "get the ball in play" is 40m. The question is: "how wide are the fairways at Sheshan?
In golf, you aim on a line (very precisely), and then you hit the ball into a space. As you have found out from your work on Trackman, a 1 degree error in club face alignment at set up turns into a much more significant space size in the landing area.
It's your job to know what percentage of shots finish in the 10 point area with various clubs and with various swings. Armed with this knowledge, you can be more confident about deciding on a club/swing combination for your Plan A and Plan B tee shots for each hole at Sheshan.
Know Your Limitations
If you are a Dirty Harry fan, you will remember Clint Eastwood's famous line: "Man's gotta know his limitations". Well, do ya, punk?
Sorry, got carried away there a little! Dirty Harry was right though, you need to know what you can't do. Its important on a golf course to only try to do what you know you can do. If you hit 100 draw shots with your driver on the practice fairway over 10 Aussie Rules Stroke Play drills (using the 10 Ball Test), and can only get 7 balls into the 10 point area (7%), then it might be smarter to play another club / swing combination as your "Go To" when you are at Sheshan. You have plenty of time before the tournament to find out what your highest percentage tee shot club & swing combination is.
We will talk about how you can use Google Earth to get an idea of how wide the fairways at Sheshan are in the next blog.
JC
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