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The Bad News

© Bill Howard

As users of the Internet, we have been consistently beaten over the head with the idea that it is a "wonderful tool". It is unquestionably a wonderful educational tool for a number of disciplines. One with, as Internet pundits are wont to point out, "limitless potential".

Alas, for some fields, the Internet's potential is packaged with a number of obstacles. Some of them are apparently insurmountable at present. Consequently these segments of Internet life have evolved very little. My particular field, teaching golf, finds itself in this unfortunate circumstance.

There are thousands of golf sites and pages out there. A good many of them do a remarkable job on scores, stats, features and information. The biggest names in golf publishing have announced their web presence with authority. There are also golf counter-culture offerings, passionately rendered personal pages, and the inescapable commercial and retail sites.

Here is the bad news; For the foreseeable future, learning golf via the Internet will offer no advantage over books and magazine articles. Yes, you can access more information in a shorter period of time. No, when tinkering with your golf swing this is not a good thing. Better to immerse yourself in one book than five magazine articles.

Know this, for a golf game to improve, a golf swing must change substantially. You are welcome to delude yourself with the common magazine fostered notion that an equipment change or an alteration in you course management style will yield results. It is simply not true. The level of golf you play is tied directly to the quality of your golf swing. To improve your swing, you must first know what's wrong. Streaming golf videos do no good if they don't apply to your specific problem.

As a former teacher, I've long wrestled with how best to teach golf over the Internet. As I mentioned earlier, there are a number of significant obstacles to doing it well. The biggest of these is the fact that as a teacher I'm unable to see or hear a student hit the golf ball. I'm clueless as to how this can be overcome.

Apparently, so is most everyone else. I have scoured the web for ideas. As best I can tell, the state of the art involves sending videos of your swing to a professional. This is not progress. We were doing this in the golf industry 20 years ago. The only difference now is that Beta is gone and 8mm has joined VHS as the other available format. It also involves snail mail. But the biggest knock on this approach is that unless teacher and student share knowledge of concepts and terminology, it's the Tower of Babel all over again. Most pros pitching this option strongly advise that you first read their book.