DAVID TREASURE
Dubbo Golf Club, NSW October 2017 handicap: 31 October 2018 handicap: 15 David Treasure has played golf all his life but it wasn’t until he started getting regular lessons that he saw his game improve. In just 12 months, he saw his handicap plummet 17 shots to 14.1, before rising slightly to plateau at 15 at the time of publication.
The 35-year-old land surveyor joined Dubbo Golf Club, in the Central West of NSW, in 2015 and was playing o a 31 handicap in late 2017 when he decided he was going to implement a one-year plan to halve his handicap.
“I joined the club when I moved to Dubbo four years ago and then last year I was about to give up the game,” Treasure confessed. “I was completely over it. The guys in my regular group were telling me I should go and try something else.
“I was trying to compete with my mates and found that they were all hitting the ball fairly consistently and I wasn’t.
“Every part of my game needed work but my driver was particularly bad. I was hitting huge slices and there was a lot of inconsistency across the board. I couldn’t string three or four shots together at the time. Some of my drives wouldn’t make 100 metres … skied shots, slices, tops … everything. I just couldn’t compete
“But I’m not one to say ‘that’s it I’m going to throw in the towel’. I wanted to get better.”
Treasure’s first step to a better golf game was looking for a golf coach, which is when he got in touch with experienced PGA Professional and Golfing Machine Doctorate instructor John Furze at Duntryleague Golf Club, in Orange, some 140 kilometres away.
“I did a lot of research on golf coaches and discovered The Golfing Machine, which oers an actual structure of teaching … you can read the book and learn as well as going for lessons,” he said.
“The first thing we worked on was my set-up and a pre-shot routine and I did it over and over until it was ingrained … 90 percent of bad shots are caused by a poor set-up.”
Treasure regularly makes the one hour and 45-minute drive to Duntryleague to see Furze but also uses technology to keep in touch with his mentor.
“It’s not an easy drive but I make the eort because I could see the benefits of seeing Johnny as all the parts of my game from the driver through to the short game started to improve,” he said. “We also have a system where I have been filming myself and I send it through to him, views it on his phone and he gives me feedback, which is great.
“My job does give me flexible working hours and allows me to practice everything I have been taught. There’s no point in getting coaching and then not practicing what you have been taught. You have to write notes and remember what your coach has told you and you go away and work on it.”
Throughout the past 12 months he gradually ticked o a list of goals he had set himself – break 100, break 90, have two birdies, have less than 36 putts. Now, with all facets of his golf game improving, Treasure feels confident he can achieve his next goal of reaching a single figure handicap by the end of 2019.
“The lower your handicap gets the harder it is to keep going lower, I realise that,” he says. “But you have to have a goal and that’s the one I’m striving for.” And Furze has no doubt he will do it. “The way Dave is swinging now is such a marked improvement to where he was. Its chalk and cheese,” Furze said. “It’s so much better and he just needs to keep working on certain things.
“When we started working on his game, Dave began with mini two feet back, two feet through swings and learning the proper impact positions and gradually built his swing up. It was all back to basics.
“Now he’s got the swing and there are only little things we tune up. He’s so dedicated to improving, he’s applied himself and he works on everything we’ve covered in a lesson. More importantly, he listens and he does.”