The best golf thing I’ve used in 2025 is a single, simple image

For so many years, I have described it as a high single-digit handicap. Right in the 8-9 range, occasionally playing as a 10. The reason was clear to anyone who played with me: that guy’s got speed but man that driver can get loose.

With that one word – loose – you can imagine the sights: high, straight and FRI.

To continue to explain, I’m going to have to drop the humility for a second. I am athletic. I have good hand-eye coordination. I grew up on baseball, basketball, football, you name it. Hence the swing speed – 110 to 113 mph with driver, just below the tournament average. And the contact is often AROUND the center. Not perfect, no. But sometimes completely off center of the face. And why this MUST produce a good result, sometimes center shots were the ones that landed furthest from the fairway. I spent years buried in the resulting confusion.

My problem with all that speed was that I wasn’t patient enough to use it. I wasn’t giving myself enough time for it Complete the back flip in front of my legs, hips and core shot in front of my arms and hands. My upper and lower body were trying so hard to sync up right before contact, instead of being in sync at some point earlier on the downswing.

I created a natural lag and a lot of torque, but I struggled with a steep landing – those hands rushing into the contact zone – due to a very fast pace. What I’ve learned is … this is one of the hardest things to fix. A coach stood behind me and held the clubhead at the top of my swing to make sure I hit that spot and stopped—just for a split second—before I hit the ball. Of course, this helped diagnose the problem. High-speed cameras would show how my hip rotation was rarely synchronized with shoulder rotation. But over time, without that distance coach with me, the bad habits returned.

So what gives? Why, dear reader, should you keep reading through the trials of a golfer you barely know?

Because your profit may be similar. You may be as visual of a learner as I am.

That’s part of the deal, right? If creating a new, repeatable part of your swing is at least partially a self-taught exercise, then we all need to realize what kind of learners we are. I am determined NO a kinesthetic learner. I’m much more of a visual perceiver of the world. The NEEDED to take notes in college, just to write things down so I can see them on the page instead of hearing them from my professor’s lips.

All this means, I need images. I need those high speed cameras. To understand myself, I also needed a shaky visual thought. That’s why I spent most of 2025 thinking about Hideki Matsuyama and Cameron Young.

Most avid golfers know that these two players share one swing element more than any other: they stop at the top of their backswing in such a way that it seems you cannot see anything else. Every part of their swing seems to rotate around that stop pointas a fulcrum that keeps everything in balance. Both swings are fast and violent, but they are PATIENT. And I channeled them throughout 2025.

No, I don’t have a pause in my swing like Young or Matsuyama. This is because smelt is different from true. As it all seems, to my various play partners, it’s something much more fluid. But in my head there is a forced patience during the last 10% of my backlog. I’m thinking about getting to my point Cam Young before I pull my hands back down to the ball. Just the image, burned into my consciousness of the ball – much like the one at the top of this article – has made for better contact and actually more controlled feel in the hitting zone, which makes sense. My lower body and upper body feel more in sync during the fall. I reach a place of synchronicity earlier than ever before, and this allows my hand-eye coordination to take over.

How does it look, in terms of results?

The big, high, right miss is mostly gone, due to the sheer fact that my natural swing – cutting the ball a bit – causes me to start everything on the left end of the fairway and slowly bleed back to the right. The more durable swing is also a much shallower swing. Shallower means less movement in the hitting zone and less spin, always a good thing with the longest club in the bag.

So what’s up for grabs here on December 31st?

Take an online test to find out what type STUDENTS you are Then find an arrangement that fits that learning style. For the visual people out there, a simple picture can do the trick. For audio types, maybe it’s whispering your thoughts while moving over the ball. Kinesthetic learners may need to do muscle repetitions for several hours before they feel confident in them. And if you are a combination of many types of learning, you will probably try movements in front of a mirror. Here’s a quiz to help you get started on that journey.