There’s an important part missing from your practice

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Nico Darras describes himself as “the monster who lives under your bed,” which doesn’t quite fit someone so pleasant.

What Darras really means is he forces you to confront the parts of golf that scare you the most. We were discussing a regrettable sequence from my round a few weeks back in Orlando: a ball behind a greenside bunker, a flubbed chip into the sand, a double bogey that made me want to fling my wedge into a lake. It would be easier to try to forget a hole like that ever happened. Darras’ company, Golf Blueprint, exists to ensure those are the moments we focus on most.

“If you and I spent the day together, you know what the first thing we're going to do is?” Darras asks. “I'm going to go put your ass in a tight lie, right behind the bunker, and you're going to hit that shot. And success or failure isn't the result. How many times do you go to practice and face your fears?”

I’ll admit, my default form of practice during the summer is to throw on some headphones after dinner and chip and putt in flip-flops until I’ve found a groove. Save for dirty looks over my footwear, there is hardly a face-your-fears vibe. Darras says that’s a miss. A practice session without pressure is like weight training with balloons.

“Think about most amateurs,” says Darras, a former baseball player who turned his attention to golf after suffering a career-ending injury. “I go to the driving range all the time and just sit and watch what they do. They have no targets, no alignment aids. It’s just bad, bad, bad, bad. So the goal is to give them some structure. That’s the lowest hanging fruit.”

If practice is when you refine your technique, it should also account for how that technique changes in different contexts. This corresponds with the idea of “competitive IQ” referenced a few weeks back. The tour pros Darras works with all have coaches to help with their swings. His job is to create practice situations that resemble competition, when every shot has a consequence. Think of putting drills when you can’t go home unless you make 20 3-footers in a row, or a range session in which a drive off the grid means a set of push-ups. It might look stupid, but so does hitting 3 off the tee.

Last year, Golf Blueprint devised a practice game for us that requires no more than three tees and space on a practice green. My colleague Luke Kerr-Dineen explains how it works here, and describes how even tour pro Nick Dunlap got worked up trying it on a photo shoot last year. Which is precisely the point. The more stressful the practice environment, the more likely we are to uncover tendencies that will surface when playing for real.

You can try to ignore the monster under your bed all you want. But the way to get better is to know how to handle it.