Tip Tuesday: How to Improve Your Putting with 75 Cents

Too good to be true? Not at all, especially when you see how simple the premise is. Let Mel Sole of the Mel Sole Golf School in Pawleys Island, S.C. show you a simple drill that incorporates three quarters to improve the roll on your putts.

Good afternoon everybody and welcome. I’m Mel Sole, director of instruction and master professional at the Mel Sole Golf School in Pawleys Island, South Carolina. We are located at beautiful Pawleys Plantation Golf and Country Club.

Today I want to talk to you about improving your putting stroke for 75 cents. How would you like to do that? Watch carefully, I’m going to show you how you can improve your putting stroke. We’ve all been taught over the years to keep the putter low through impact and I practiced for many, many years trying to keep my putter low through impact.

Well, the recent studies have noticed that when you either try and keep it low, you either catch it towards the bottom of the ball or you catch it even on the down swing slightly and you get what they call skid. The ball will actually have a little bit of back spin as it takes off and for the first six to 12 inches, the ball will be spinning backwards and you’ll get the skid which is very difficult to judge distance control on longer putts.

You want to try to get the ball rolling immediately. Research has shown that as the putter comes up, if the putter’s actually moving upward slightly, where you’re catching the ball more with the bottom edge of your putter, that you’re hitting it slightly on the upswing, the ball will start rolling almost instantly. What you do is you take 75 cents, three quarters, and you put them behind the ball. I’m going to place them behind the ball now.

I suggest when you do this, don’t putt to a hole. I don’t want you focused on whether the ball’s going in the hole or how hard you’re hitting. First let’s get the stroke flowing. I’ve got the coins behind and I want to be able to make my stroke without touching the coins. In order to do that, my putter’s got to be traveling upward slightly. Just stand and practice this and I can feel the ball coming off that bottom edge of the putter and the ball is just rolling absolutely beautifully, and it’s a nice soft feel off the putter face as well.

This is something you can do at home on your carpet. You can go to a putting green. As I said, don’t practice to a hole where you’re worried about distance control. In the beginning, work on this. Once you’ve got the stroke going, now I can pick a target and start working on direction as well.

Work on this, I guarantee you, it’s going to improve your putting!