Tip Tuesday: Speed Control Putting Drill

To control your putting distance, you need to control your speed. Allen Terrell of the Dustin Johnson Golf School at TPC Myrtle Beach in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina shows us one way to achieve that through a drill he calls “Reverse Leapfrog.”

So, speed control is one of the skills that we see as probably the one where most people need the most improvement, but they practice the least. Probably a lot of times they just don’t know how to practice it. A lot of times we see people, all they’re doing is around the hole trying to make the putt, not really paying attention to how fast the ball goes if they miss it.

Always, always pay attention to your speed.

So, we’re going to do another speed touch drill, called “Reverse Leapfrog.” What you do is just get maybe 15 to 18 feet from a fringe or put a club down as a back border. You can use a quarter. There’s a lot of different variations of how to do this. Just take a certain amount of golf balls, and your goal is that the first ball has to come to rest short of the fringe. That’s usually the hardest one. So, if it rolls up onto the fringe, then you have to start over.

You go putt the first ball, and then the only rule after that is the next ball has to always finish short of the last ball you putted. So, your goal is to see how many balls you can get from the fringe back to your feet.

Again, you could set a border 10 feet in front of you, where the ball has to finish past it, but the most simple way is see how many balls you can stack between that fringe and where you started. So, this next ball we’re going to putt, it’s got to finish short of the last one I putted. Then if you putt it past or if it hits the fringe, either one of those, you add up how many balls you got in the box, and that’s your score. Then you try to beat it every day.