But how on earth can Scottie Scheffler be the most consistent player in the world with that swing? How does he manage to hit the ball so many repeated times in the centre of the club face with that footwork more akin to Fred Astaire than a professional golfer? How much can a swing of these characteristics waver over time? Can/should it be imitated?
Surely you, a golf enthusiast, have asked yourself these same questions at some point during the last two years of Schefflerian domination. Obviously, we don’t have the answers, but there are people who can help us understand the keys, the secrets that this American’s dance holds in each journey to the ball, especially from the tee.
We have consulted with two experts. Two gurus in the field. They are Jorge Parada, coach of Carlota Ciganda, and Juan Ochoa, comprehensive trainer of Ángel Ayora. In these cases, it is best to keep quiet and let those who know speak.
Jorge Parada’s analysis:
“The first reaction when seeing Scheffler hitting balls, with that strange and unorthodox foot movement, is to think that it is a bit exaggerated. However, I call this dynamic balance. Another example is Bubba Watson, a player who moves a lot, almost jumps when hitting the ball, but is never seen off balance. The same happens with basketball players. Even though they spin in the air and do a thousand somersaults before dunking, they are always, or almost always, balanced.
Another fundamental aspect is that Scottie’s foot movement starts slightly just at the moment of impact, when the right foot moves a little backwards, but in general most of that dance happens after the impact. For this reason, it does not affect him what we think should affect him.
The why and how this dance happens has its reasons. It’s like the chicken and the egg, which comes first. Did he do this and that’s why he has this swing? Or did he have this swing and that’s why he does this? The answer can only be known by his youth coach.
Let’s try to explain why Scheffler moves his feet so much and generates a seemingly ramshackle swing. We start with the initial stance. He is more upright than other players. At the top of the backswing, the left arm is a little more vertical than other players, the club more crossed, the club face a little more open, the right arm a little higher, the right elbow bent more than 90 degrees and behind his head. It is a position that, seen from the front, the arms are behind his head and the right arm has moved and lagged. All this gives him a more vertical swing and with a more open club face.
With this initial movement, in order to hit the shot he likes the most, which is a fairly high draw, he needs time and something to help the club plane a little, come a little more from the inside and give time for the club face to close.
How does Scheffler do it?
We look at the downswing. The first movement is very lateral, both of the upper and lower trunk, which makes the driver swing more vertical. To get the club to come more flat and from the inside he does it in the following way:
At the start of the downswing, the head begins to move to the right. He achieves this by bending the spine a little backwards and to the right. In addition, the right shoulder gets closer to the right hip, while the left shoulder stretches in relation to the left hip, with the aim of tilting the spine a little more backwards and thus slowing down the body rotation, which allows the club to come down a little more from the inside.
This movement causes the head to move away from the position it was at the top of the backswing because the body is lifting a little, a sequence that Jack Nicklaus or Tom Watson already used in the past to make the swing flatter and not so vertical.
The next in the sequence is that the club aligns with the left arm faster than other players, for example Jon Rahm, Collin Morikawa or Dustin Johnson, who have their hands very ahead of the ball at the moment of impact. Scheffler does not have them ahead. Thus, he manages to align the club face and hands much more with the left arm. This allows the club face to close, but at the same time causes the club to approach the ground in a more abrupt and faster way. In this way, if Scheffler did not do something to coordinate all that movement, he would hit the ground, he would not have the ability to control the low point of the swing as well as he does.
The key to everything is that Scheffler starts to push very hard against the ground with his legs and feet. He pushes upwards and backwards. As the head and spine lean backwards and the spine, the gesture of the legs pushing against the ground is as if he were initiating the movement to jump. In fact, with the driver, his pelvis, if we look at his belt, from his position in the setup to the impact, he raises it about ten centimetres, which is quite more than the Tour average. His pelvis moves away from the ground, as if he were jumping and this causes him to lose traction in his feet and stability against the ground. This is what makes him move so much backwards.
It is a movement that some players do in one way and others in another, depending on the rotation. It is one of the reasons why the feet lose weight and move backwards. When they lose weight they are not in contact with the ground and they move. That strong impulse of the feet against the ground is his way of flattening the swing, that the shaft comes a little more from the inside and flatter and hits the driver higher. With the irons it happens a little less because he hits more downwards.
Nicklaus and Watson had a similar body movement, not so much of feet. They are players who have the club open in the backswing, the arms higher, more vertical, the right elbow more flexed and, therefore, the club comes down very vertical and something has to be done to flatten it. Scheffler stretches, lifts, throws his head back and pushes against the ground abruptly to make the pelvis move away from the ground and thus generate more space for the shaft”.
Juan Ochoa’s analysis:
“Scottie, despite dancing a jota after paying the ball, has a very good pressure pattern, which makes it easier for him to be very repetitive with his way of launching the club. What is the good pressure pattern?
At the beginning, he moves the pressure to the right foot from the tip to the heel. Just before completing the rise he has already started to move the pressure with the whole body to the tip of the left foot. Just after the transition, and due to his rotation, he moves all of this quite aggressively towards the left heel while extending the body through the ball.
Here you see the transition without leaning back with the upper part:
In this image it is verified that there is zero excess rotation in the hands, which comes from his plane and body position before hitting the ball:
This club face position in the lower image is incredible at that point. And of the body too, even though with the aggressive zigzag of feet he has created it gives the sensation that one day he will fall off a cliff. Better not let him throw like Jordan Spieth at Pebble Beach, he will fall off…
Scheffler manages to have very little rotation of the club face through the impact, which is crucial to be a hitter with a lot of precision. The swing as such is not to make a school of it, but it does have quite a few points that are textbook: how he moves and presses in transition for the downswing, how the club and hands pass through the ball and the extension of arms before finishing the swing.
This analysis tries to be concise and accessible. Surely, purists will miss many details in this explanation, but you can really make a Netflix series on the subject”.
