Golf Notes: How a Laundry Basket Can Take Improve Your Shots Around the Green

It seems as if improvement in golf scores comes in spurts. Once you've learned to hit those long golf shots on a consistent basis, and not squirt them left or right, you reach a scoring plateau. No matter how much more you practice you just can't shave off those three other strokes that might get you consistently into the low eighties or high seventies. Maybe the problem is that you aren't practicing efficiently. If you think practice can only come after you've driven over to the driving range and paid for a bucket of golf balls, you may be missing out on the kind of practice that would do the most good for your game. The kind of practice I'm talking about is not only convenient with regard to your time, it's free!

Almost everyone understands that golf courses are laid out such that two putts are allowed on each green for the player to score par in regulation. But missing the green slightly, chipping on close, and one-putting results in the same par score. Therefore, if you can improve that chip shot from slightly off the green, you can manage more pars (and drive the members of your regular foursome nuts). And you can change your game in only a few minutes each day, in your own back yard, with only about two dozen balls, your pitching wedge, and a common household laundry basket.

Start by placing the basket about 10 feet away, and lobbing an easy chip shot into the basket. Make sure you are keeping your hands forward, striking the golf ball first with a short accelerating blow, and not trying to lift the golf ball in the air yourself. Let the lofted club head do the job it was designed to do. Sounds easy, right? Well, here's the practice trick. Keep track of the number of shots that actually hit inside the diameter of the laundry basket with the first round of shots. Also, keep track of the pattern of shots that maybe didn't hit the target, but came close. Do not move from the 10-foot distance until you have hit about 100 golf shots, and have convinced yourself that you have hit a good close pattern of shots inside or very near the target area. Your number of golf shots hitting the target should be improving with each round of shots from this distance. In essence, by challenging yourself with each successive round of shots, you have created a game of your practice, which makes it more enjoyable and less like work.

Once you have gained confidence from that distance, move the basket to the next range, say approximately 15 feet. This sounds like a small change, but believe me, you will be training your hand-eye coordination to respond to some fine tuning. Repeat the process above, until you have reached the point where most of the golf shots are in or near the target. Then extend the range one more time, again by about 5 to 10 feet.

On the second day of practice, begin with the distances that you mastered the day before, and make sure that you are still able to put a high percentage of golf shots in the target. If you need to continue to work on these same distances, take the time to do it. The golf season is a long one, and you will have plenty of days to stretch out to those longer ranges.

Now that you have begun to practice your short golf game with the laundry basket in the yard, the next time you are on the course, and playing a shot where you are slightly off the green, place your laundry basket (in your mind's eye) on the green in the location where you want your ball to land. This is going to get those chip shots in for a chance at one-putting, and a few may even go in the hole.

One other trick. While it is not necessary to hit every chip shot as a lob, where it gains altitude and sticks when it lands, there will be times that you will need this shot to clear the ball over at tree limb or something similar. This technique can also be perfected in the back yard. During your practice session, simply place something 6 to 8 feet tall between you and your laundry basket target, and open up that club face during the golf shot.

A final suggestion would be to make sure you clean the grass clippings out of your laundry basket before actually using it again for your clothes. Otherwise, practice hard and enjoy those new low golf scores!