Tour Sticks: A simple, cheap golf training aid

If you've been to a tour event, PGA or LPGA, it's likely that you've seen a pair of colorful sticks protruding, along with 14 clubs, from golf bags. In all likelihood, these are Tour Sticks, a simple but useful training aid that many tour players use, often as alignment aids.

"I was playing mini-tour events every now and then three, four, five years ago," said Shane Carlisle, who founded Tour Sticks. "I started seeing guys laying orange sticks on the ground."

Carlisle went to every golf shop in the Dallas Metroplex in search of them and came up empty. Eventually he asked someone where he got them. The answer: Home Depot.

"I thought this is a great idea," Carlisle said. "I can't believe no one is taking it to the golf industry."

Carlisle did, with remarkable success for so simple and inexpensive a device ($14.95, including two fiberglass sticks, a carrying tube and instructions on a variety of uses besides simply alignment purposes).

"I thought they'd be popular," he said, "but it would be hard to say I expected it to be this popular."

-- John Strege