Pro Tour Golf College Opens its Doors for 2011

After months of planning and preparation Pro Tour Golf College launched this week. The brain child of David Milne and Lawrie Montague two of Australia's most experienced and well known golf teaching professionals, the college was developed to help prepare highly advanced male and female golfers from around the world for a life as a touring professional golfer.

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Students in the program are trained from 8am to 1pm Monday to Friday and are exposed to a high intensive training environment specifically designed to help condition them mentally, emotionally and technically for a life as a touring professional. To give you an idea of what the students have already been exposed to this week, here's the schedule for the first two days.

ASSESSMENT WEEK
This week is assessment week or data collection week where we test and measure the students skills sets. As its a long weekend we are training for 4 days this week with most of the students playing in the Easter tournament in Mandurah on the weekend.

Monday ------------Putting skills
Tuesday -----------Greenside skills
Wednesday ------Golf course skills
Thursday ----------Full-swing skills

MONDAY - PUTTING SKILLS PROGRAM
On Monday the students were subjected to a comprehensive putting skills assessment where they hit short and long putts ranging from 1 metre to 25 metres. This was an intensive experience but gave them a great undertanding of how to train to perform. Following is the program outline wihich consisted of a total of 250 putts hit over 3.5 hours.




40 putts from 1 metre to 4 metres on a level to slightly sloped green
40 putts from 10 metres to 25 metres on a level to slightly sloped green
40 putts from 1 metre to 4 metres uphill
40 putts from 1 metre to 4 metres downhill
40 putts from 1 metre to 4 metres left to right
40 putts from 1 metre to 4 metres right to left
10 putts from 2 metres using TOMI putting system

250 Putts in Total

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TOMI PUTTING TRAINING DEVICE
TOMI is the only personalized putting training device that captures the critical parameters of our students putting stroke in real-time. From this data, TOMI can instantly tell us what we need to do to dramatically improve our students putting stroke. Our students will use TOMI to provide them with the feedback they need to improve their putting stroke and lower their putting average.

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TUESDAY - GREENSIDE SKILLS PROGRAM
Today the students played 200 hundred chip/pitch/lob and bunker shots from challenging positions around the practice green. It was every bit as intensive as the first day on the putting green. Following is an outline of the types of shots played and the distances they were played from.

40 - 10 metre to 25 metre chip shots
40 - 15 metre to 30 metre pitch shots
40 - 10 metre to 25 metre lob shots
40 - 15 metre to 30 metre trouble shots (rough)
40 - 10 metre to 25 metre bunker shots

200 Shots in Total

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18 HOLE GREENSIDE SKILLS CHALLENGE
After the students completed their scheduled program they participated in an 18 hole short-game skills challenge where they played one golf shot from 18 different positions around the green (All moderate to difficult shots). The winner of the challenge was ultimately decided by measuring the proximity of every golf shot struck by each student on each hole and then the total distance in metres was divided by 18 holes which gave an average distance from the hole for each student.


The winning golfer averaged just 2.2 metres from the hole after 18 shots, an excellent result and the winner by the narrowest of margins only 24 centimetres. This type of practice is an encellent routine for engaging the golfers competitive instincts leading into the weekend tournament and is also a great way to wind down after the intensity of the rigorous training schedule.

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THE DEBRIEF
At the end of every training session we get together for thirty minutes to go over the program and discuss the effects of the day's program on each golfer. Here's one of the comments from Sam Crawford one of our PTGC students:

"I found that todays program really required patience. The demand of the program is to dig deep, stay in the zone and have complete focus.This to me is one of the most important aspects to master if I want to be competitive, therefore I am confident that this program and process of training will give me the best opportunity to reach my goals."

Tomorrow we have an 18 hole golf course assessment where we get to see first hand how the students handle the golf course and themselves. That should be interesting.

We look forward to keeping you updated with the progress of the students in the PTGC program.

David Milne and Lawrie Montague

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