Golf Skills Assessment on Tee Shots
A few years ago, I created a golf skills assessment test and wrote a blog post about it that you can read here. With the start of any golf season, it’s important to test your skills from the start so you can see your improvement over the next 5 to 6 months of the golf season.
Today’s golf skills assessment test will be different than the one I wrote a few years back. I love to mix things up and I also believe in finding simple golf drills that test your basic fundamental skills.
So below you will find golf skills broken into categories and within each skill assessment category you’ll find simple golf drills testing your skill level so you can see where you need to improve and where your strengths are!
The golf skill assessment categories include:
- Off the tee
- Iron play
- Pitching
- Chipping
- Bunker Play
- Putting
In upcoming articles on the Golf Practice Guides Blog, we will be covering different faults and fixes in the golf swing, followed by short game, and mental game tips. Make sure to subscribe to our email newsletter and stop by the blog each week for the latest lessons in this new series!
Golf Driver Skills Assessment – Off the Tee
For each of these category assessments of your golf swing, use your driver as the golf club of choice to complete the drills. Another day you can repeat with woods, hybrids, and irons to learn about your skill level with each type of golf club.
Ball Flight Trajectory:
The first golf swing assessment is your ability to change the ball’s flight trajectory in air. Every golfer hits the ball different heights naturally with each of their clubs. Some golfers prefer low golf shots while others like to hit the ball high.
But you’ll also need to know how to hit the high, medium, and low trajectory ball flights as they’ll be needed in different situations on the golf course. For example, on a windy day you must lower the ball flight to fight the wind and still get distance out of your golf clubs.
For this test complete and record your stats:
- Hit 10 balls trying to hit with low trajectory. Record successful shots out of 10 tries.
- Repeat for medium and high shot trajectory. Record successful shots out of 10.
Aim to score 20 or better (66%) out of 30 attempts for this assessment.
If you score less, then that means you fail to consistently shape the ball flight and should work further on it so that it becomes easy to hit a low shot when you need to and a high shot when you need softer landing or going over trees.
Draws & Fades Assessment:
The next 20 golf balls should be split up so that you use 10 for hitting draws and 10 for hitting fades. If you’ve got no idea how to properly hit a draw golf shot or hit a fade golf shot, check out the respective articles I linked.
- Record successful draw shots out of 10 attempts
- Record successful fade shots out of 10 attempts
Analyze the data to see after 10 tries, could you consistently hit a draw on command when you wanted to? Same for the fade, was it easy enough to pull off when you needed to?
If you struggled to get 7 out of 10 or better for each, then you’ve got some work to do. Also, how much did it draw / fade? If it turns into a severe hook or slice, then don’t count it as a successful draw / fade shot.
A draw or a fade ball flight should only move 10-30 yards at most.
In other words, if you aim to the left edge of the fairway, the ball should fade back to the center or right side of fairway at worst. A severe slice would end up in the rough several yards away from the fairway.
Resource: 36 Golf Driving Range Practice Routines + Putting + Chipping Drills
Concluding Thoughts
There you have it. A simple 50 golf ball skill assessment to test your golf swing and see how well you can shot shape the ball.
The first 30 golf swings are broken up into testing high, mid, and low flight trajectory and the last 20 swings test your ability to move the ball left or right with draw / fade shot shaping.
The ball doesn’t need to always go perfectly straight and perfect mid ball flight trajectory. Learning how to mix and match ball flight trajectories with shot shaping can help you hit more consistent shots.
You are essentially playing with more predictability of what your golf ball is going to do so you can adjust for it on the tee box, prior to hitting your driver.
Want more golf driving range drills and practice routines to follow step for step? See below..