Spring High School Golf Season Practice Tips
Playing golf in high school was one of my favorite experiences and if I could go back and do it again I would. I was a practice junky, at the golf course 4-5 hours per day after school until sunset. I loved seeing improvement in my game.
With that being said, I wanted to share some different golf practice tips with you today if you are preparing for the Spring High School Golf Season. Spring golf is usually a short season, lasting from April to June in High School Golf.
Therefore, look at it like a 60 day sprint, where you try to improve as much as you can as quickly as you can!
Nick’s Best Golf Tips for High School Season
1. Start with the Putter from Inside 5 Feet
The first golf tip to start with is working on your putting and specifically within 5 feet of the cup. There will be many putts attempted this high school golf season from 5 feet or closer to the cup and you better make 95% of them!
You can quickly improve your golf scores by becoming a great putter from 5 feet or less. Spend at least a half hour every day hitting putts from 5 feet and then spend 2o minutes from 4 feet, and 10 minutes practicing from 3 feet.
2. Get Comfortable with Your Wedges
The next best area to practice is your chipping around the greens. Getting really comfortable swinging your wedges, working on ball striking so you can chip the ball crisply onto the green consistently.
We all hate when we chunk, skull, mishit our wedges and the ball either doesn’t make it onto the green or it shoots across the green and goes into the rough grass on the other side.
3. Distance Control Chipping Practice
Once you master ball striking and can get consistent with making good contact with the ball with your wedges, then work on distance control with your wedges.
I love practicing this fun chipping game which involves creating circle rings around the hole from different distances at 3 feet and at 5 feet using ball markers.
If you can chip the ball inside of the 5 foot ring that is placed around the cup to measure 5 feet from all angles, then you score 1 point. If you chip within the 3 foot ring, getting the ball even closer to the cup, you get 3 points. And if you chip the ball into the cup for what’s called a “chip-in” then you get 5 points.
Try chipping 10 balls and see what score you can get, with a max score of 50 if you were to chip all 10 balls into the cup for 50 points. Getting a 30 or better is considered really good.
4. Ball Striking Practice with Irons
While the first 3 high school golf practice tips were focused on improving the short game (putting and chipping), we also can’t forget about our iron play. Hitting crisp iron shots can help set up opportunities to make pars and birdies in golf and take stress off of your short game.
To work on improving your iron play and hitting better, straighter iron golf shots, we must first practice ball striking. Many high school golfers need practice making consistent contact with the golf ball with their irons.
A great drill for this is to place a tee in the ground a few inches forward of the golf ball and so that the tee is almost all the way into the ground with just the top head of the tee barely sticking up.
The goal is to hit the golf ball first, then hit the tee out of the ground. This will work on ball striking, making sure you are creating ball first contact and then taking a divot after.
Many beginners will have a divot that starts before the golf ball, meaning their golf swing bottoms out to early and they hit the ground first, then golf ball. This can lead to chunked golf shots and inconsistency in distance and shot shaping control of the irons.
5. Swing Tempo Practice with Your Driver
Our final golf practice tip today, is to work on swing tempo with your Driver. The Driver is definitely a favorite golf club for beginners and high school golfers to practice with as we all love to hit the ball hard, and far.
But overswinging with too much force, can throw our swing out of sync and mess up timing, causing all kinds of problems. Instead, we want to focus on swinging the driver with rhythm and tempo. This will help you stay under control and hit longer, more consistent golf shots with your driver.
A drill for this is to make 3 swings. The first should be with 120% power, the next should be with 80% power and the third should be with what feels like normal, full swing 100% power.
By practicing these 3 different swing speeds you’ll begin to get familiar with what each feels like and you’ll learn that the 80% swing feels like you have better control compared to the 120% swing. This hopefully will inspire you to start swinging with better tempo and not trying to smash the ball as hard as possible.
Overall, I hope these golf tips help you improve your game and give you some confidence on what to practice when golf season starts up in your district. You can check out my book on High School Golf here if you’d like more tips and drills!
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