“Most of the other sports have figured out that the real strides are made during the off season, golf is the last sport to come around to that,” said Victory Links teaching professional Jason Erickson. “When you have a chance to come inside and take the club out of your hand and forget about results for a period of time you have a much better chance to understand and grow. When you’re always playing results seem to get into the way of progress,” The clubhouse at the Victory Links Golf Course at the National Sports Center has opened a new indoor leaning center called the Golf Dojo that will change the way you approach the game.. “We call it the Golf Dojo with the idea that learning the golf swing would be like learning martial arts where we can go in a step by step process and we have players of all levels and abilities in the same room working on the same things at the same time,” said Erickson Aspects of this training include showing the right way to go about getting better and having a club in your hand may not be the best way to understand the fundamentals. The keys to the game the golf pros want to teach involve learning concepts and taking out the wrong way of doing things most golfers form as habit. “When most people learn they’re training their unconscious mind to swing the club and they don’t actually understand what they are doing. We try to go nice and slow so that the conscious mind and the subconscious mind are learning the same thing at the same time so we do what we think we’re doing instead of something else,” said Erickson. Even toy trains are valuable learning experiences. “The first thing we do in a golf swing is move backwards. Train goes backwards first to connect up all the cars. At the top of the backswing their is a transition, the arms continue to go back and the arms continue to go forward and we get connected then we want to pull the club through with the engines of our train which in the golf swing are our left leg, our right leg, and our trunk. We have a training model with three engines pulling the club cars, shoulders, arms, elbows, arms, wrists, and hands on our cars. The left leg, right leg, and the trunk are the engines. We want to have the engines pull the cars when we’re swinging,” said Erickson. Minnesota has the highest amount of golfers per capita in the United States, contains 581 courses, and will host the very popular world golf event Ryder Cup this summer. The love of golf is strong in this region and it can teach some valuable lessons along the way. “You can always learn something about yourself and about your environment when you play golf. Mostly it’s understanding who you are and the unique challenges that you get to take on in golf. Also when you’re performing golf you get to do things that you know you can’t really do every time but you get to be better than you are that day and hit shots that you know if you had another 100 tries at you couldn’t do it but today in that round you were able to so that’s what I like about the game,” said Erickson. If component golf instruction sounds appealing the Victory Links Learning Center has several classes for all ages, including a Friday night youth specific class. “We call it take the date night back which is a way for kids to get exposed to golf in a less structural way where they can just come here and hang out and hit golf balls, or play games, or ping pong and do whatever they want all tying back to the golf theme,” said Erickson. Golf is a sport just about anyone can do if they put the right effort into and these classes are aimed to guide those who will listen in the right direction. “I’ve spent the last 25 years trying to make the game more accessible to more players so if you can break it down into really small incremental steps then it becomes more accessible to everybody,” said Erickson.
Victory Links Brings Golf Lessons Inside
BLAINE, Minn. – (Jan. 21, 2016) – Golf: It may not be on your mind in the middle of winter but a new way to train indoors may warm those thoughts.
