During my last year of Junior Golf I was fortunate enough to be invited into a player development camp by the Royal Canadian Golf Association.  At the time legendary Canadian Amateur golfer Doug Roxbrough was in charge of the program and the main goal was to produce Professional Golfers much like Australia was doing at the time.  To this day not many Canadians are playing the PGA Tour and at this time the program has been un-successful.  Out of the 12 players that attended my camp in Western Canada only Chris Baryla from Vernon British Columbia has made any sort of waves and will be playing the PGA Tour full time in 2010 thanks to a amazing 2009 on the Nationwide Tour.

Although I am not playing the PGA Tour along side Chris I still feel privileged to have participated in the camp as the knowledge I gained was absolutely massive.  All of the knowledge helped me understand the game better and just what exactly all the worlds top Golf Professionals were thinking about when they played the game.

One important tool I learned while at the camp was on course management and was a strategy called Playing the hole backwards.  Playing a hole backwards is the most effective way to manage our selves around a golf course.  Instead of thinking about playing a hole in this order

1-Drive 2-Layup 3-Approach

We have to play a hole in the opposite order like this

1-Approach 2-Layup 3-Drive

This is a strategy that might be new to all of you but is used by every Professional Golfer you see on TV.  We don’t just step up to a tee box and hit our drive.  We must think about pin location, shape of the hole, if there are any hazards on a hole and what distance the hole is before we select our club off the tee.

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