Each year when pros venture across the pond, they’re tossed far from the confines of their comfort zone.
Playing in the severe elements presents a new set of challenges when it comes to the way players prepare. Players’ fundamentals — their grip, posture, stance and ball position — are usually pretty locked-in. But during Open Championship week, that begins to change.
“The ball positions tend to creep further and further back, the upper part of their trunk starts leaning more towards the target, and they tend to get closer to the ball,” he says.
They tend to be subconscious changes, Ruggiero goes onto say in the video above, an instinctive result of players “trying to keep the ball down.” But left untended, the ball will start veering in unwanted directions.
So to succeed next week, a large part of players’ prep will be paying extra attention to those fundamentals to make sure they done drift off course. Keeping things balanced and centered at setup: That’s where players’ preparation will be focused at setup ahead of the Open.
