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Originally Posted by dcg1952
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Nice endorsement on your brochure from Mike Holder!
You seem to be the man who brought "hitting" back into the mainstream ( Thank you, thank you, thank you!!). Did you teach as much hitting back then as you do now?
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Mike Holder and I were together in
Homer Kelley's GSEM training class in January 1982. He didn't bring a recorder -- I'm tellin' you guys, all this now 'everyday' stuff was still very new back then! -- so I made him copies of my own tapes. Later, when I put together the brochure, he provided the ringing endorsement you read.
Regarding your question, I taught
Hitting conceptually in the School's lecture, but centered the training around a
Swinging Pattern. That was because most students were -- then and now -- Swingers. It was important that I get a handle on 'who was what' as quickly as possible, so I would video-tape each Student's Stroke before Class began the first day as they hit into a big net in our indoor ballroom setting. I also shot a Stroke Sequence with a high-speed camera bought especially for that purpose. I would then send the film out for 'instant' processing -- there were no 'one hour' services available so I paid a good bit extra to muscle my way to the front of the line -- and the Students would get a little flip-chart booklet of their own Golf Strokes on the third day, fully marked up with a grease pencil and accompanied by my personal recorded analysis. Our classes averaged from twelve to twenty students, and I had to get all that work done at night, so Young Yoda was a busy little fellow. But, as a result, I absolutely knew what I had to work with in each individual case.
The training was rooted in the precision alignments of the Mechanical Checklist For All Strokes (12-3) and the Twelve Sections of the Stroke (Chapter Eight). We would first learn to identify the boundaries of each Section -- Students would call out the name as they moved to it ("Start Up"..."Backstroke"..."Top," etc.) -- and then pose for ten seconds in each, monitoring the Alignments as I called them out. We also worked hard on the three-step Address Routine of 3-F-5. Over a period of three days, these alignments became more and more habitual, and students learned to both train and check themselves. We moved from Posed Positions to very Slow Motion Strokes
through the Positions to Normal Speed Strokes. Much of this was done first with a ClubSHAFT only and only later with a real Club. And always without a Ball (except as a reference point to Swing through!). As a consequence, quite a bit of real learning went on -- not just Ball-beating -- and many of my students enjoyed rapid success. Several became the
Most Improved Player at their club during the year of their training, and one 5-handicapper in the Spring --
Tim Rash -- won the Richmond (Virginia) City Amateur Championship in the Summer. He wasn't a 'five' anymore!
Oh, back to your Hitting question....
When the video and sequence photos showed I had a Hitter on my hands, I taught that Pattern. As the Class went through the Swinging procedure, I modified the Pattern and pointed out the differences along the way. I often would use them as a contra-example for the entire Class. Still, I had not worked much on Hitting personally and consequently did not understand it nearly as well as I do now. That is why it is important for the competent Instructor to master
both Patterns. To most effectively
teach, it is not enough simply to
remember and
regurgitate...
One must
know.
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