It’s been raining here in one form or another for the better part of the past week.  I did manage to get out to the driving range on Tuesday, but other than that, Mother Nature has foiled me again. For many of you, it’s tough to find time to play golf, let alone commit time to improving.  With family, job, and other obligations, just blocking out four or five hours on the weekend to play is tough enough.  It’s even more tough when there are violent thunderstorms or torrential downpours that turn your precious golf time into something else time. Then, to make matters worse, it can happen for a few weeks in a row.  As we all know, golf is a “use it or lose it” skill.  Those of us who deal with an off season know that it takes a while to get it back in spring.  The last thing you need is to lose it in the summer because of some poorly timed rain. The first step in all this when your

We golfers practice for one reason:  to be able to hit the shots on the course that we hit on the practice tee.  We are training our bodies to produce an automatic reaction on the course to whatever shot we are faced with.  We hit certain shots repeatedly on the practice tee and practice green until they become second nature.  When they come up on the course, the fact that our bodies have been programmed to hit them inspires confidence and we greatly increase the chances for success. The main problem is, though, that the practice tee (unlike the practice green) is not necessarily comparable to what we’re going to face on the course.  The shot conditions out there are generally different than what we experience on the practice tee.  The key is to be aware of the differences while we’re programming our brains so that we can effectively make the transition. Lie Quality Perhaps the biggest difference we face between the practice tee and the course is the quality of the lies we see.