See Your Full Game

By Lynn Marriot and Pia Nilsson

With Matthew Rudy

Photos By Dom Furore
Photo illustrations by Jim Luft

June 2007

Determine if you are right-eye or left-eye dominant.

Both ranked among Golf Digest's 50 Greatest Teachers, Marriott (above, top) and Nilsson run the Vision54 Schools at Legacy Golf Resort in Phoenix. Marriott was the 1992 LPGA National Teacher of the Year; Nilsson was captain of the 1998 European Solheim Cup Team.

Our goal here is to show you that golf is an integrated experience: physical, technical, mental, emotional and social. By taking an expanded view of your game and learning how to visualize, you can get those elements to work together. Players like Annika Sorenstam have used these techniques to have great success.

It's easy for a player trying to break 100 to get overwhelmed by a lot of technical instruction. A lesson where you're bombarded by mechanical thoughts is a failure, because you can't incorporate so many things into your game at once.

The 90 scoring barrier is one that resonates for so many players: When you can consistently shoot in the 80s, you feel you're a good player. The desire to break that scoring goal can do some damaging things to your thought process, though.

Tour players spend more time practicing putting than any other individual shot, and for good reason. Being able to make putts gets more important as your scoring potential gets better.

A lot of professional and elite amateur players who already have fantastic technique and top-level fitness have come to see us. They clearly didn't need much help with actually hitting the ball. But what many of them lacked was a clear, focused decision-making process about what shot to hit, and the courage to stick with the decision after it was made.