YOUR AD HERE »

Summit County golf pro tip: Avoid the dreaded three-putt with practice drill

Robbins Manley
Special to the Daily
Breckenridge Golf Club PGA Pro Robbins Manley demonstrates the frisbee putting drill. The drill is designed to help golfers get a better feel for aiming long distance putts.
Breckenridge Golf Club / Special to the Daily |

How many three-putts do you have in a round?

Avoiding the dreaded three-putt is a surefire way to lower your golf score. Certainly we would love to make all of our putts, but the reality is that we need to learn to two-putt. One way to do this is to practice by learning to putt to a Frisbee disc on the practice green — one of the driving range’s under-used features.

From putts of 20, 30 or even 40 feet, I often see golfers focus on the hole. But how often will a 30-foot shot across the green be either flat or straight? Not often. Most putts in that range will have to contend with some slope or break. That’s where practicing by aiming toward a disc comes into play. To practice a putt that is going to break to the left, we are going to put our disc to the right of the hole (see photo).



Once we have decided on the placement of our disc, the focus needs to be solely on that location — don’t let your eyes wander back over to the hole. When we focus on the hole, the chance of missing the putt below the hole increases.

The more we practice this technique, the better we will become at placing the disc in the correct spot. The concept is to focus our thoughts on the disc and not on the hole.



In the long run, this will allow our putts to end up closer to the hole, and eventually a few will fall in.

Robbins Manley is a PGA course pro for the Breckenridge Golf Club


Support Local Journalism

Support Local Journalism

As a Summit Daily News reader, you make our work possible.

Summit Daily is embarking on a multiyear project to digitize its archives going back to 1989 and make them available to the public in partnership with the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection. The full project is expected to cost about $165,000. All donations made in 2023 will go directly toward this project.

Every contribution, no matter the size, will make a difference.