Length of Putts
In this blog we will refer to different putt lengths to help better judge your game and your attributes. NO MATTER WHAT DISTANCE IS BEING PUTTED THE SAME PUTTING STROKE IS USED. Sorry to yell but I am a coach and it happens sometimes. There are some different tactics that we will use depending on the length of the putt. Of course they are very arbitrary and you may need to adjust your personal preferences.
- Short Putts – 1-6 feet in length. Average golfers will make about 75% of these. Good putters will make about 90%. Tour players make about 95%. Our goal on this site is to teach you how to make every single one of these putts. We want to get you up in the 95% range. Why is this so important? If you can make over 90% of your 6 foot putts then it is not so difficult, and not so never racking when you have a putt of this distance. This is usually the putt for birdie or par, but if it is the putt for boogie it counts just the same. Making more of these putts will help the rest of your putting game, and your chipping game.
- Medium Putts – 6-15 feet in length. Average golfers will make about 30% of these. Good putters will make about 45%. Tour players make about 60%. You can see by the statistics that the tour players are starting to pull away from the rest. There is no reason for you not to get to the point that you are making 60% or more of these putts. I like to think of this as the attack range. You can still be very aggressive most of the time in trying to make these putts. These are the putts that can make a good round bad, or a good round great.
- Long Putts – 15 feet and longer. Average putters will make about 5% of these. Good putters will make about 15% of these. Tour players will make about 30%. After a certain point they are all just long putts that you have to try to get as close as possible, and give it a chance on going in. Believe it or not many times I will just kind of putt the ball down there trying to get it close. I call it throwing it at the hole and see what happens. Since I coach football I will make an analogy about it. Lets say a team has 3rd and very long. Many times they will put their best receiver on a long pattern and just throw it to him and see what happens. Best case is that they catch it. If not there is a good chance that the player will get interfered with and draw a penalty. Most of the time it is incomplete and they will have to just punt. Worst case is that the ball gets intercepted. But a good quarterback will be able to guard against this using some technique. That is what we will focus on is guarding against the big mistake. We will concentrate a lot on getting the ball within 6 feet so that we can make the follow up putt at least 90% of the time.
We will keep this article active so that you may come back to it often.
Good Luck and Good Putting
Coach Kip
