ROLLING THE ROCK
PGA Professional Matt Ballard demonstrates how marking your ball correctly and some $2 coins can greatly improve your putting stroke.
I LOVE using a line on the ball in training, although, I do have some students that don’t use any line at all, and that’s fine also, they are intuitively good aimers. For an intuitive player, putting a line on the ball can actually make them worse.
The majority, however, are the opposite and putting a line on the ball gives great feedback on the quality of strike.
If the line is scrambled when hitting putts (pic 1), I get players to do a putting to nowhere game. With no target and a lined-up ball, hit some 10- to 15-foot putts to nowhere, solely focusing on the quality of the strike and roll of the ball rather than making putts. A good roll will see the line on the ball stay ‘upright’ (pics 2 & 3).
Quality of strike is not just horizontal it’s vertical, so where do you actually hit the ball on the face. Do you hit it in the toe or the heel, low or high? A fault that I see is a lot of players hitting the ball low on the face (pic 4). It’s in the middle of the face but low. There is less loft down there and the ball is not rolling properly early because we need loft to get the ball out of the slight depression it is sitting in.
If anyone comes to me with speed control issues I can almost guarantee they are hitting it low on the putterface.
A simple drill I get players struggling with speed to do is to get a couple of $2 coins and put them on the ground on top of one another. Setup to them like a ball and hit the top coin with the bottom of the putterface (pics 5 & 6). Most people who are hitting their putts on the up too much won’t even touch the top coin to start with.
Usually you will find after doing this drill, your strike moves up into the face (pic 7) where the desirable loft is and the ball starts rolling properly (pics 8 & 9). Commonly, people will say they feel they are timing the ball better or the ball has got more energy.
Timing is not something that is associated with good putting very often, as it is with good ball strikers, but making sure you find the middle of the putterface, something that good timing achieves, is exactly what you want.