A bucket of balls costs about twelve dollars and buys you ninety swings from level ground, perfect turf, and a target that never moves. It is the most comfortable environment golf has ever invented, and it is almost nothing like golf.
I spent a decade hitting balls two evenings a week and shooting the same score. The range was making me a better ball-striker and a worse player. Here is what I practise now, and what I wish someone had told me when I still believed that a straight ball on the range meant a straight ball on the course.
1. The first tee shot, cold
Nobody gets a warm-up on the first tee of a Saturday medal. You get out of a car, put on a shoe, and hit a driver at a target you can't see well, with three people watching. Practise that: walk from your car to the tee and hit one ball. Then go home. It feels absurd. It is also the single most valuable repetition in golf.
2. Uneven lies
Find the worst patch of ground on the property — the slope behind the practice green, the mound by the cart path — and hit ten balls off it, ball above your feet, then below. Your swing will need to change. That's the lesson. On the range, one swing shape works from every lie, which is the opposite of what a course asks of you.
3. Bad turf
Tight, bare, sandy, or thick and wet. Range mats forgive everything because they present the ball at precisely the height your club wants. Real turf does not. If your course won't let you hit off the grass, at least alternate: one off the mat, one off the ground.
4. Aiming at something small
The range has flags at forty-yard intervals and a fence. Pick a specific object — a divot, a leaf, the base of a flag — and commit to it. Then guess where the ball landed before you look up. The guessing is the practice. Without it you are just making noise.
Range golf is a game of shot quality. Course golf is a game of shot selection. You can be excellent at the first and hopeless at the second, and most of us are.
5. Hitting to a number you hate
On the course you will be asked for 63 yards, 141 yards, 118 yards — numbers no range has ever displayed. Learn what your half-wedge and three-quarter swing actually carry, and write the numbers on a piece of tape on the shaft. It will feel like cheating. It is just knowing your equipment.
6. Playing the second shot before the first
Before you hit, decide where you will drop the ball if this one goes badly. Then hit. If it goes badly, go play the recovery for real. You cannot do this on a range with a fence, which is why you should do it on the course on a quiet evening instead of buying another bucket.
7. Putting with something at stake
Twenty minutes of putting practice without a consequence is twenty minutes of rehearsal for a game you're not playing. Play three holes around the practice green for a dollar. Miss on purpose never. The range can't teach you nerves because nothing on a range matters, and everything on a green does.
8. Being tired
The shot you'll remember from Sunday is the fourteen-hole one with heavy legs and a bad mood. Practise that shot: hit balls after a walk, not before. Fatigue changes your swing more than any tip you'll read this month.
9. Stopping
The most underrated skill in amateur golf is walking away mid-bucket. When you hit three bad ones in a row, stop. Your body is telling you something that forty more swings will only deepen. Leave the last thirty balls in the tray. It's twelve dollars. Your swing is worth more.
What to do this week
Take one bucket. Hit ten balls with a driver, then put the driver away and spend the rest on a nine-iron from a slope, a sand wedge from bare ground, and a putter on the practice green for a dollar a hole. Then go home while you still want to come back. That is a week of practice that will show up on the card, which is more than I can say for the decade I spent on the mat.
