Satoshi Kodaira and Kramer Hickok each shot a PGA Tour career-best 7-under 63 to share the Travelers Championship lead.

Steve Stricker shot a 7-under 63 to take a four-stroke lead in the Bridgestone Senior Players Championship.

The threat of lightning caused the first round of the BMW International Open to be suspended on Thursday with Wade Ormsby the clubhouse leader.

How else are you supposed to celebrate your first major victory than by cranking some tunes and turning the trophy into a goblet?

PERSONAL LAUNCH MONITOR BUYER’S GUIDE

Flightscope, Trackman or Foresight? Which one are you picking?

These are the leaders for golf launch monitors but they come at a price. $15,000 to $25,000 to be exact. So who has the money to spend that much for data? Not many. However, there is an alternative in the personal launch monitor space for a more reasonable price.

Many of the best players in the game rely on launch monitors to dial in their game. Bryson DeChambeau, Phil Mickelson, Justin Thomas are just a few professionals been seen using a launch monitor at the 2021 US Open practice rounds.

Given that many of the best players in the world use these devices to drive both equipment and on-course decisions, it’s understandable that average golfers would be hungry to do the same.

Personal golf launch monitors are the Holy Grail for the average golfer looking to improve their golf game. Technology is developing rapidly, and personal launch monitors have improved over recent years. These gizmos might still need a few years to become more accurate and provide more data points, but they’re able to offer enough information to help you reasonably dial in your game, with your expectations managed.

I loved reading a recent article about Brooks Koepka’s recent and past success at the US Open Tournaments. If you are hitting great shots where you focus on the right swing, your confidence and success will just grow. It’s easy for the pros to get this feeling but recreational players just look forward to hitting 2 or 3 perfect swings on every hole. Of course the mishits creep in but you will only shoot great rounds if you can forget about your last mishit and focus on your next great shot.

“The most important shot in golf is your next one.” Ben Hogan

That article highlighted 3 areas where Brooks picks up stokes on the field:
1/ Analyze each shot to understand where your best miss will be. (A long putt is much better than trying to hit out of a pond.)
2/ Brooks plays to avoid double bogies. (It’s OK to hit a sand trap but make sure that you next shot stays on the green.)
3/ He putts with confidence so his mid-length and short putts are firm and into the back of the cup. (Weak putts curl as they slow near the hole. Practice with enough speed to pass the hole by 2 feet and eliminate a lot of the break at the hole to sink more putts.)

The most important area of our games where we can easily drop more strokes is PUTTING. Most of us average 2 putts/hole or 36 putts/round. Unfortunately the rest of your game would have to be perfect to shoot a 72. Fat chance!

That’s exactly why I write so many blogs about putting. If you don’t have a confident putting grip and stroke you will never lower your scores. This week I received an interesting response from one of our followers from the West Coast of Australian (NSW), about a new putting grip that helped him win his club championship. Phil Parker has never putted better now that he is using his “Y Grip” Putting Stroke.

This week, 156 of the best women golfers will tee it up in Atlanta for the KPMG Women's PGA Championship. Here's what to watch for as the women compete in the third major of the 2021 season.

MyGolfSpy Experiences is a way for us to make your golf trips easier. We make the plans, we test out the courses and then fill you in on everything else a golf destination has to offer after your 18 holes are finished. This time we’re in Virginia sampling all of your Williamsburg golf options.

Meet Your Travel Guides

We’re Harry and Miranda Nodwell, MyGolfSpy employees (and, yes, married). Harry is the Director of Testing at MGS and a professional golfer. I’m the Content Manager—aka, I make sure the content you want to read makes it from the brains of our talented team to your screens.

We live in an East Coast golf paradise: Williamsburg, Va. There are so many great courses in our area! We’ve picked three that Harry is going to break down for you. Then I’ll guide you through everything else Williamsburg has to offer.

Who better to learn from than a couple of locals?

The Golf

Kingsmill: The Woods Course

Here’s Harry:

I often get asked if there are any exercises that can be practiced away from the course that can improve your mental game of golf.

Fact is, the mental game of golf could essentially be called “the mental game of life”. How you are off the course (mentally), is reflected on it. i.e. how well you can focus, deal with stress and challenges, use techniques to be confident, etc. is the same whether you are playing golf or not. This is why you can work on these skills as you go about your daily life and at the same time, improve your mental game of golf.

I’m always trying to find ways to improve my overall well being and productivity and here are 7 of them I’ve found to be very effective during my days.

Habit 1: Make Your Bed

How you’ll improve your mental game of golf: self-discipline, keeping a sense of order

What you do as soon as you wake up can affect the success of the entire day. 
When the pandemic started in March 2020 and most people had to start working remotely, many were enjoying the prospect of being able to work in their pajamas and not have to do all the things that we normally do to start our days, like making our beds. Hopefully for them that got old quickly. 

Martin Kaymer and Graeme McDowell, players who have holed decisive putts for Europe at Ryder Cups, were appointed Wednesday as vice captains for the team for the 2021 edition at Whistling Straits in September.

Defending champion Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau enter the tournament as co-favorites. Here are our best bets for the event.

The 60-man field for the Olympics was set on Tuesday based on world golf rankings, and there were a half-dozen late withdrawals, including U.S. Open runner-up Louis Oosthuizen.

Mark Crossfield, sometimes fondly referred to as the Grandfather of YouTube Golf, joins us to finally put the great shaft debate to rest: Do they really matter?

1:06 – Has the world of YouTube golf changed in a decade?4:28 – Does letting “the algorithm” choose your content ultimately hurt golfers?12:33 – What impact does our testing have on consumers?18:40 – The Great Shaft Debate32:06 – Mark’s verdict on shafts

Watch Now

Also available on:

iTunesSoundcloud

and all major podcast apps.

 

The post Does the Shaft REALLY Matter? ft. Mark Crossfield | NPG 86 appeared first on MyGolfSpy.

Tom Brady seems more than ready to partner with Phil Mickelson in their charity golf match against Aaron Rodgers and Bryson DeChambeau.

Anirban Lahiri has made the cut at the 60th spot.

 

The post Visalia City Amateur Championship appeared first on Northern California Golf Association.

There is a lot of cool gear in the golf equipment world that doesn’t always fit neatly into Most Wanted Tests or Buyer’s Guides. You still want to know how it performs. In our We Tried It series, we put gear to the test and let you know if it works as advertised.

What We Tried

The Forme Pro Short, designed to correct and train your hip posture, reduce pain, and accelerate muscle recovery.

What is Forme?

Remember the Forme Therapeutic Shirt article that was published a few months ago? If not, you might want to read it to get the low down on what Forme is and how they can help you.

For a small back story, Forme is the brainchild of Dr. Stephen Liu, orthopedic surgeon and sympathetic son. When his mother was undergoing treatment for cancer, Dr. Liu often helped her breathe by pulling her shoulders back, thus opening up her lungs.

Eventually, Dr. Liu created a team of intellectuals, doctors, scientists and technology pioneers to employ the same strategy for others. With athletes in mind, Forme created the Ace tee and sports bra, a wearable therapeutic designed to correct and train alignment of the spine/neck/shoulder/hip and increase joint movement, reduce injuries, boost recovery and provide better breathing for higher oxygenation.

Tech packed and beautiful – The all-new RomaRo Ray Type-R+ iron now shipping at TourSpecGolf!  This is an iron that has a great balance of distance forgiveness, shape, and feel.   This is a single-piece S20C forged iron!  Pretty much every iron with this amount of tech is multi-piece so you lose feel and a small degree of accuracy.

The first major feature is its deep pocket cavity.  It is a tapered cut out wide near the top and narrows at the bottom to achieve the most forgiveness without compromising feel and sole durability.

The Type-R+ iron also has what Romaro calls the 3R sole,  here at TSG we call this the triple cut sole and it is one of if not the best types of sole grinds in golf today adopted by both smaller and larger equipment manufacturers.  The purpose of the 3R sole is to reduce digging if you come in steep but also work well with those who come in more level sweeping the ball.  It also helps the ball sit like a player’s iron when grounded at address.

The overall size and appearance from the address I rate excellent,  it has only a small amount of offset considering the segment it is intended for.  The top line has some width but still not chunky in appearance.

Copper Underlay is implemented to improve feel and softness.  This is something unique as you usually only see copper underlayer on players’ cavities and blades.  This is a semi-game improvement undercut design that has implemented the use of copper for feel.

Three new Titleist T-Series irons are available to PGA TOUR players for the first time this week.The T100, T100•S and T200 will replace current models later this summer.A U•505 Utility is also coming.

Titleist T-Series Irons at the Travelers Championship

The release of pictures of the new Titleist T-Series irons provides evidence that we’re creeping towards the fall release season. The industry’s launch cadence is typically predictable. However, there may be some surprises this year.

Despite compounding shortages of shafts and grips, expect some companies to push forward on schedule. Others are all but certain to hold new launches into 2022.

With Titleist announcing PGA TOUR seeding of the upcoming second generation of its T-series irons, the company looks to be among those sticking to the schedule for the rest of 2021.

As is typical for Titleist Tour seeding, the story is light on technical details (literally none) and heavy on the theme of validation with the requisite reminder that Titleist has been the most-played iron on Tour for seven years straight (and 16 of the last 17).

 

The post Sacramento County Men’s Championship appeared first on Northern California Golf Association.