Jones shares ball-striking secrets

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This article was published 05/04/2023 (532 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Drew Jones is ready for an obscure kind of beach day as soon as the snow melts.

When golf courses open and most golfers play “winter rules” — moving their balls to healthier patches of grass for easier shots early in the season — the Brandonite will set up at a bunker on an open hole and pepper a fairway with iron shots.

It’s only crazy if it doesn’t work, right? You’d be hard-pressed to find five golfers in Westman better than the 28-year-old teacher, so he must be on to something.

Jones is as pure a ball striker as you’ll find around here and breaks down his success into three steps. Ball-first contact is Step 1, and training in a bunker exaggerates anything less than a pure strike, sapping distance in a hurry.

“The feedback is instant,” Jones said. “It’s going to feel like you’re squishing a marshmallow between the ball and your club face if you catch sand before.”

As we wait for Mother Nature to expose our fairways and greens, some of Brandon’s best amateurs will use this space to share their tips about the strongest parts of their games and how all golfers can improve in those areas.

To put Jones’ game into context, he shot an opening-round 7-under 65 in the 2021 provincial men’s amateur at the Neepawa Golf and Country Club. It was one shot off of Neepawa head professional Landon Cameron’s course record and Jones missed multiple short putts.

He has ridiculous control of his irons — that’s Step 2 of his keys to ball-striking mastery. Jones focuses on the relationship between the swing path and the club face. The closer to neutral both are and the more predictable they are, the easier it is to decrease the severity of misses.

Some players take use launch monitors that quantify path and face angles. Jones has a simpler, more accessible method of practising into headwinds as much as possible. It magnifies path and face inconsistencies, turning what would have been a small miss on a calm day into a potentially disastrous result.

The third and hardest step is distance control. This is where we’ll pivot our focus to something anyone who reads and employs the following sentence will benefit from immediately.

Stop aiming at the pin.

Every golfer should have heard by now that firing at the flag leads to higher scores than targeting the middle of the green.

Jones follows the Decade Golf system, which selects targets based on proximity to holes and potential danger around greens. For example, the ideal target on a hole with a flag near the edge of a green adjacent to a pond is further from the flag to ensure more shots stay dry, even if fewer end up close to the cup.

Decade stats also taught Jones that it’s better to have a 30-foot downhill putt than a 30-foot uphill chip, which goes against the classic advice of “keep it below the hole.”

The big stat that stood out to Jones was that PGA Tour players who retained their cards one season hit approach shots past the hole 49 per cent of the time, while the guys who lost their cards were only past it 40 per cent.

That makes sense when you understand Decade’s concept of approach shots following shotgun dispersion patterns. Everyone’s iron or wedge shots will fall within an average radius of their target — better players have tighter dispersions.

The problem is most players fear hitting it long and pick a club whose maximum distance is the yardage to the pin.

“You’re taking that club you hit one time when the stars aligned with the moon and all that stuff went right,” Jones said with a laugh, “and you’re just going to end up further away from the hole and statistically you’re going to be making a higher score, it’s as simple as that.

“We need to be playing for quality of strike being 90 per cent versus putting our shotgun pattern — the very end of it — at the pin. “If half of your shots are finishing past, half are short, that means your target is in a good spot.”

As for other parts of the game, Jones emphasizes taking an honest look at your strengths and weaknesses. He tracks stats using Decade’s strokes gained data but simpler tracking of fairways hit and missed, greens in regulation, scrambling percentage and putts per round can illuminate areas to work on.

While everyone can always get better at everything, the quickest route to lower scores lies in our most glaring weaknesses.

If Jones has one, it’s handling tournament pressure. He admits his lack of experience in competitive rounds plays a factor. He has contended early in Golf Manitoba major events but faltered late or simply got outplayed by another elite talent like his runner-up finish behind Ryan Sholdice at the mid-amateur last summer when he carded a final-round 78.

Jones wishes he’d learned some of these things earlier. Much like he laments not having coaching when he took to golf around age 13.

But he makes up for it with meticulous practice and says he’s “addicted to the process of getting better.”

“Golf’s the only sport I wasn’t naturally good at, I think,” Jones said. “That’s why it’s now one of the most important things in my life. The pursuit of excellence in golf, I don’t know why but it makes me happy.”