I need to hit more fairways!

[BobsYourUncle]

For a while now I've been saying chipping & putting is the main weakness of my game. But let's look at some stats from a 2016 MGS article (https://mygolfspy.com/2016-report-ov...e-by-handicap/) compared to my stats in GolfShot.


Putting:


I averaged 31 putts per round over my last 20 rounds. So I'm actually doing OK there.

GIR:


This is an area I've been pretty happy with lately, and this backs that up. Over my last 20 rounds, I've averaged 46%. That's pretty good.

FIR:



So as a 4 handicap, this suggests I should be hitting above 50% of fairways per round. My average? 35%. And that's being bumped up a bit by me taking a driving iron off the tee a bit more often because my driver has been poor. Ouch. My average over the last ~2 years of keeping stats is 41%, which is only marginally better. I know "effective" fairways is a better stat, but my home course isn't exactly tight off the tee, so these numbers are a pretty good indication of my driver performance.

Just looking at recent rounds, it's fairly obvious to me that my (in)ability to get in the fairway off the tee is costing me shots. Sure, I'll miss a couple of putts, and hit a few average chips, but if I could place my ball in the middle of the fairway on all 14 par 4/5s, I'm going to shoot pretty close to even par.

So there's something I need to work on, and drawing some inspiration from Flavzz's thread on driver improvement, here's mine. My goal: I want to get to 60% FIW.

I'm going to make a serious effort over the next few months to work on my game off the tee, and post my progress here.

I don't have a really solid plan yet. Step 1 is probably to just hit more balls with driver/3w/3i, because that's not something I've been focusing on much when practicing recently. I'm also going to work on target selection - all the experts seem to think you need to pick a precise target, but I'm pretty slack there, usually just making a half-hearted attempt at picking a target line.