Sean Foley - The Golf Whisperer

[GolfSpy_X]

When I came to the WGC-Cadillac Championship here this week, my hope was to get some simple, straightforward insights into how golf coach Sean Foley works with his star pupils. I could have asked to focus on Tiger Woods, Foley's most famous charge, but Justin Rose is less loaded as a personality and makes a better case study. In the three years that he and Foley have been working together, Rose has risen from No. 76 in the world rankings to No. 5 and, depending on how you slice and dice the data, is now either the best pure ball striker in golf or merely one of them.

 

Foley doesn't give straightforward answers, though. He is among the most technical and scientifically oriented coaches in golf. He's never without a high-speed video camera slung in a bag from his shoulder and throws around phrases like "correct the thoracic tilt" and "a function of attack angle versus loft in the horizontal vectors." But that doesn't mean he thinks or coaches in anything close to a linear fashion. It turns out Foley, 38, is a seriously cosmic dude.

 

When I asked him to explain Rose's rise over three years from 67th to 19th to fifth in one measure of long-iron excellence. Foley gave me a one-word answer: "Myelin."

 

Excuse me? "That's the insulation that wraps around neural brain circuits and helps them fire faster when presented with certain stimuli," he said. Laying down more myelin, over time, helps secure new skills; that's the value of those reps Woods always talks about. " 'Swing change' is really a stupid term, because it's actually just gradual evolution in encoded brain patterns," Foley said.

 

Rose hooked up with Foley in 2009. "I always felt like I was a good player, right? Going back to when I was a kid," he told me. He turned pro at 17 after tying for fourth at the 1998 British Open, but missed his first 21 cuts. With time he improved, reaching No. 6 in the world rankings in 2007 before hitting another slump. "For me, the turning point was the 2009 U.S. Open, playing with Sean O'Hair [a former Foley student]. He was just hitting the ball in a way I felt like I couldn't—the quality of the strike, his ball flight. It made me really question the track I was on."

 

He approached Foley, and the two hit it off immediately. Both are thoughtful, curious and take the long view of improvement. Rose's first clue of Foley's holistic world view was that he gave Rose only two drills to do for the first five months. "The drills helped right off, which was nice," he said. "But they were aimed at helping my back by getting me to turn my pelvis more through impact."

 

Rose had terrible back problems for years, resulting from the way he had been taught to swing, so addressing that was Foley's first order of business. "The pain response is omnipotent. It can change everything else in a swing without a player knowing it," Foley said. As much progress as the two have made since then, the "final frontier," as Rose calls it, still relates to that postimpact pelvic turn. He's been working intensively with trainers to improve the external rotation of his left hip. But until that improves sufficiently, Foley said, "it's not worth working on." A good point for amateurs: Foley teaches only what he knows his players are functionally able to do.

 

FULL ARTICLE

[Maverickping]

Nice article and I think he is one of the smartest minds in golf. I used to take lessons with one of his coaches now based at his school in Orlando, Annie Mallory (who now works with some LPGA girls) when she would be up here.

I think his results speak for themselves.

[whiskey golf]

I don't think I would be able to take lessons from him because my brain would blow up, if he uses all those technical terms, videos, etc.

[GolfSpy WD]

I'd love it

[wbealsd]

I'd love it

+1