Katie Rudolph remembers the first time she saw her prized pupil, Megha Ganne of Holmdel, New Jersey, swing a golf club at a driving range at age 8.
“She was striping 7-irons,” recalls Rudolph, a First Tee coach and chief operating officer of The First Tee of Metropolitan New York. “I stopped dead in my tracks and said, ‘Who is this kid?’ Everything was perfect in her swing.”
Ever since, Rudolph has been the only instructor for Ganne. The 16-year-old has progressed to become a four-time Drive, Chip and Putt finalist, having lost a heartbreaker (in 19 holes) in the semifinals of the U.S. Women’s Amateur, shot a tournament-record 62 at the Girls Junior PGA Championship, scored an invitation to the 2020 Augusta National Women’s Amateur (since postponed) and received a sponsor’s exemption into the ShopRite LPGA Classic scheduled for late May.
From Weequahic Park Golf Club, home base for First Tee Newark, Ganne hits balls out of an indoor studio into snowbanks during the winter. Up until a couple of years ago, she viewed growing up in the Northeast as a disadvantage.
“I used it as an excuse for why I wasn’t as good as I wanted to be,” she said.
And now? She realizes she’s continued to make steady progress all year long.
“I think the difference is I don’t see my results while I’m making a swing change in real-time because I hit into a net,” she said. “When you hit a bad shot, you’re less inclined to go back to what was working. Since you don’t see the results, you trust it more than if you did.”
And just as Rudolph fondly remembers her first time seeing Ganne swing a club, Ganne hasn’t forgotten her first experience at First Tee with Rudolph.
“You told me we were playing for $1 million,” Ganne reminded Rudolph. “That continued and now Katie owes me $34 million.”
Rudolph sheepishly grinned and replied, “I have every intention of paying you back. Just as soon as I win the lottery.”
Avoiding early extension
Ganne and Rudolph make big swing changes during the winter. This year they spent a lot of time doing two drills to avoid early extension. This faulty swing pattern causes the arms and club to get stuck behind the body during the downswing and forces the torso to rise and elevate through impact.
“Girls in their formative years at impact tend to go up on their tippy toes and over time learn how to stay back,” she said. “Male pros are heavy in their left heel at impact.”
Rudolph is an advocate of using ground force to generate power. In the first drill, Ganne leans against an exercise ball and a wall.
The goal is to not let her rear end come off the line when she swings. The ball shouldn’t fall off the wall until after impact. “In the old days, her butt would come off of here really early,” Rudolph said. “I’m trying to get her to feel her left heel at impact. To do that, we start at the top of her swing to get her to feel the left heel.
“The sensation that I’m trying to instill in her is if someone was standing there and pulling on the left pocket at impact.”
Full-Swing Drill
The exercise ball is only good for a drill because there are limits to what it can achieve, Rudolph said.
One time, Rudolph took a long rope and wrapped it around Ganne’s waist and stood 20 feet behind her and yanked on it as she reached the hitting zone.
“I would pull her back a bit because I wanted her to feel that tension,” Rudolph said. “I always like the drills in real time. The exercise-ball drill is a valuable tool but eventually you have to put it into action.”
To do so, Rudolph stands far behind Ganne and holds a long exercise stick that she positions against Ganne’s backside while she practices hitting irons.
“We can do full swings without me getting my head chopped off,” Rudolph said. “She’s worked hard and she’s just about cured. She has a tiny bit of right arm breakdown, but I’m not too concerned about it considering all of the greats from Jack Nicklaus all the way down have had a bit of right arm breakdown.”
Chipping
If Ganne is at a disadvantage practicing in the Northeast, it may be in working on her short game. Rudolph conceived a series of creative games to make up for not being able to practice on real greens.
“It’s more about trust than technique,” Rudolph said. “How do you learn to trust yourself when you haven’t seen a ball land on a putting green in 6 months? It’s more about learning to make solid contact and believing that it will work the same way outside as it does inside.”
One go-to winter game is chipping across their indoor facility into garbage cans. The walls are dotted with dimple marks from shots gone astray and reminders of her vast improvement. When Ganne started out, she used to get five balls to aim at the target to Rudolph’s one. But slowly that ratio flipped and now Ganne only gets one ball when they compete.
“When you make it, it’s the best because everyone can hear it,” Ganne said.
The game also has made her a steely competitor. To prep for the chipping portion of DCP, Rudolph used to stand behind the garbage can with her back facing Ganne to simulate the pressure of competing at Augusta National.
“It helped,” Ganne said. “When I was in the competition, I thought, ‘Well, at least nobody’s life is at stake here.’ ”
Spin to Win
The other short-game drill Ganne does frequently is designed to manage spin and is easy to replicate. It uses a couple of alignment sticks – though you could just as easily use a club shaft – and the object is simple: Try to chip over the closer stick without the ball touching the far stick.
If the ball goes past or touches the far stick, you don’t advance the other stick. Otherwise the sticks are placed a little bit closer together each time. Take 10 shots and see how much closer you can get the two sticks to one another.
Rudolph likes this drill because it provides a way to measure progress, while Ganne says, “You can mimic those shots when you’re just off the green or you are short-sided. It also gets the competitive juices flowing really good.”
Makes
Ganne’s favorite putting drill is a head-to head contest against Rudolph or one of her First Tee friends. Both players stand by a hole and begin putting simultaneously; if one drains it, they receive a point and they switch sides. If both miss, they stay where they are and use the other player’s ball and keep putting until someone makes. If both players make the putt, it cancels out the other make and they stay in place and no points are awarded. Ganne and Rudolph usually play to five.
“The idea of this game is you don’t have time to line it up. You don’t have time to think. The whole point of the game is to look and react,” said Rudolph, who learned this putting game when she was 12 from guest speaker Davis Love III at a University of North Carolina golf camp.
“I often get beaten at this game by a lot of bad golfers,” Ganne said. “It really reminds me not to become overly technical and that I still have work to do on my putting.”
This story originally appeared in Issue 2 – 2020 edition of Golfweek magazine. Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
