By
MIKE DeJONG - Canoe Travel
"Hey! We’ve got a flipper here!" Eileen Kask is a warm and engaging teacher. She’s also highly entertaining, using humour to get her point across. However, when you’re learning from her, lay off of those blue suede shoes. “No Elvis legs! Keep everything still.” Kask isn’t running a class at Dance America. She’s a lead instructor at the Steve Dresser Golf Academy in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Today, Kask is showing me and a class of four others the finer points of golf. “Listen for it to go in the hole. No peeking,” is her advice for lining up the perfect putt. “We teach golf from the ground up,” says Dresser, director of the Academy. He started his South Carolina school in 1989 and since then, estimates he has taught more than 10-thousand students. Dresser and his instructors start with your putting stroke. It’s part of their “golf from the ground up” strategy. They believe the short game is the foundation of good golf. “Putting is 45% of your game. Driving is about 15%,” Dresser says. “So what would you want to improve?” My main problem is with my short irons. I have never been able to hit accurate approaches to the green from within one hundred yards. That is, until I visited the Dresser Academy. After a half day of instruction, I was pitching to within yards of the pin almost every time. “It‘s a game of opposites,” says short game expert Rick Mommsen. “Hit down on it (the ball) to make it go up and up on it to make it go down. Mommsen, a former police officer from Ohio, is rated as one of the top instructors in South Carolina by Golf Digest. He tells me that chipping is an extension of putting. You use the same stroke as you do on the green. Indeed, at the Dresser Academy and with golf in general, everything is connected. On day one of the school, we spend four and a half hours working on the short game. In the afternoon, we apply what we learned to the golf course. Greens fees at the top ranked True Blue Plantation Course are included in your fees. Day two at the Academy involves longer irons, woods and computer analysis. Here, Dresser and his instructors go high-tech. They videotape your swing from the side and back then play it back on the computer. Slow motion replays allow instructors to break down your bad habits. A CD of your swing, with the instructor’s voice-over analysis, is yours to take home. Mommsen points out how I “spin” on my back foot during my follow through. I would never have known had I not seen my swing on tape. “You gotta slow down a little bit,” drawls Mommsen. “We all tend to swing out of our shoes, especially with a driver. We tend to swing for the back fence.” After two-days at the school, I saw immediate improvement. My drives were straighter and my irons were more consistent. And for me, the group format was more entertaining than a one-on-one session with a pro. “The way I see people improve is first technique, then ball striking, then scoring,” says Dresser. “(But) you have to do some undoing before you can start applying the techniques.” My sessions in Myrtle Beach eliminated my “chicken wing,” calmed my “Elvis legs” and pushed me towards a nice “tick tock” swing. All easy to remember tips to take home and apply when I get out on the course. “It’s amazing the amount of people who say they wished they came here first, before they started playing,” Dresser says. “For most people, it’s not that they can’t do it; it’s just that they don’t know how to do it.” He is correct. After two-days of classes at his Academy, I won’t win the Masters, but I have learned to master my own game. Mike DeJong’s visit to the Steve Dresser Golf Academy was sponsored by the Myrtle Beach Chamber of Commerce. --- PACK YOUR CLUBS FOR MORE INFORMATION:
This story was posted on Sun, June 3, 2007 More HeadlinesGolf in Virginia's mountainsTop 10 golf courses in the U.S. Swinging in the sun Get away and golf Golfing at B.C.’s Predator Ridge |
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