Luke Kerr-Dineen finds one bad swing a round is costing him strokes

Luke Kerr-Dineen's handicap has sat around 1 this season, a bit higher than usual for a former University of South Carolina Beaufort player whose best index was plus 2.3. In a Golf IQ episode Golf Digest posted Nov. 10, he says the reason he found in his own stats wasn't a swing flaw. It was one swing a round.

What the numbers showed

He tracks his rounds with Arccos (he says nobody paid him to mention it) and pulled three from this season.

• Round one, Tamarack Country Club: he gained 0.1 strokes off the tee against a scratch golfer. One low snap hook on the 14th cost him 0.6 on its own.
• Round two, same course: he lost 0.2 off the tee. A 215-yard snapper on the 11th cost 0.4, enough to turn a positive driving day negative.
• A nine-hole round: he lost 1.1 off the tee, and a single block out of bounds on the sixth accounted for 1.3 of it.

Every other drive in those rounds came out close to scratch level. The same pattern showed up on approaches. The blow-ups came when his mind was split between wind, clubs, lies and where he didn't want the ball to go.

The fix

He went back to coach Adam Young's book, The Practice Manual, which describes types of attention a player can choose over the ball. Leaving aside the zone, which you can't summon on demand, he walks through four:

1. Internal: a body cue, like a 9 o'clock backswing on a partial wedge.
2. External process: something outside the body, like hitting the ball before the ground.
3. External result: the shot shape, like starting it left of a tree and fading it back.
4. Neutral: something unrelated, like counting to 10 or humming a song, for when nerves take over.

Young's advice, as Kerr-Dineen describes it, is to pick one before every shot and then grade only how well you held that focus, not how the shot came out. Kerr-Dineen calls it an attention scorecard.

Did it work

He says the disaster shots have started to fade. In his latest round he gained 0.8 strokes off the tee, and his worst drive, into the rough on 14, cost him only a small fraction of a stroke. Small losses like that won't hurt you, he says. The half-stroke and full-stroke misses will.

To try it, pick one focus before each shot on your next nine and tally how well you held it.