Six weeks before the courses open
One chance a year at a first round. Movement, then the short game, then a carry chart on a monitor in March.
Canadian golfers get one chance a year at a first round, and most of them waste it. Six weeks of unglamorous work before the courses open turns April into a head start instead of a month of discovering what five months off did to your golf.
Weeks one and two: movement before speed
The first sessions are about getting the body turning again after a winter of not turning at all, not about ball flight. Short irons, half swings, twenty balls at a time, and stop before it hurts. Golfers who go straight to drivers in a dome in March produce the classic early-season back complaint and lose May.
Weeks three and four: the short game nobody works on
This is the part that pays and the part everybody skips, and in Canada it is also the part a basement or a dome can genuinely improve. Chipping and putting hold up better than the full swing over a lay-off, so a fortnight there arrives on the course as scoring. A putting mat at home and twenty low running chips a week is enough.
Weeks five and six: distances and the bag
An hour on a launch monitor produces a carry chart, and in March that is the easiest hour of golf to book. Then audit the bag: grips gone shiny, a wedge with finished grooves, and the gap under the pitching wedge you meant to fill last year. All three cost less in March than in June, and the workshops have time.
The equipment jobs before the first round
- Regrip anything shiny. A few dollars a club, the cheapest improvement in golf.
- Replace the spikes if the tips have rounded off.
- Empty the bag completely, and check nothing froze and split over the winter.
- Have the loft and lie checked on irons played for several seasons.
Book the lesson in March, not in July
A swing change needs two to three weeks to stop feeling wrong, and doing that indoors in March costs nothing because you are not scoring. Doing it in July costs half of a five-month season. Teaching diaries at indoor facilities also empty out as spring approaches.
The first round is not a test
Play it from a tee forward of your usual one, without a card, on soft ground where nothing runs. The point is to walk a golf course for four hours after five months of not doing so. Everybody who treats the first round as an examination shoots eight over their average and spends a week annoyed.
The six-week plan
- Weeks 1 to 2: mobility and half swings, short irons only.
- Weeks 3 to 4: chipping and putting, three short sessions a week.
- Weeks 5 to 6: carry distances on a monitor, bag audit, regrips.
- Any week: book a block of lessons while the diary is open.
None of it is difficult and all of it is dull, which is exactly why the golfers who do it start the season two shots ahead.
