Under-the-wire trajectory drill
Lumpkin likes to have inexperienced players chip over a wire or rope to understand how to use the loft and bounce of a wedge. For a player of Harman’s talents, he sets up two stakes and a rope at various heights to create a mental image and asks him to hit under and over it to work on his trajectory.
“I want him to picture a window and try to hit it through the different slots in the window, high and low,” Lumpkin said.
To hit it lower, Harman creeps the ball back in his stance and tries to hit down at a slightly steeper angle.
“I’m not trying to stick it into the ground. I just want to cover it with the whole face,” he said. “If I want to hit it higher, I’ll move the ball forward and try to clip the grass and my divot will be shallower.”
Lumpkin’s real test is to see if Harman can hit the rope on the fly. After he did it three times in a row, Lumpkin gushed, “It’s amazing how he can do it every dang time. That tells me he can hit it the trajectory he wants to on command. This drill is another example of how everything we do is geared towards playing golf – unless he has a problem with his swing and then we work on it.”