GOLF: If it doesn’t fit, you can’t hit

Getting frustrated with hour after hour and bucket after bucket at the range, and you’re not getting any better?

It could be your clubs.

Getting the right fit is apparently a lot more important than most golfers think it is.

Pro Maria Przymierski, recently named Southwest Region PGA Teacher of the Year for her innovative instructional techniques, has created a partnership within her Green Valley Golf Instruction with Scottsdale’s Blaisdell Performance Systems, created by PGA pro Gary Blaisdell, former director or golf at Tucson National.

Blaisdell, known as a pioneer in bringing proper fit to players, founded Performance Systems in 2002 to finally give amateur golfers the same kind of inside information that touring pros have taken for granted for years.

“Molding equipment with teaching,” as Ben Blaisdell has put it over the years, seems to be a “perfect fit” for Przymierksi and her GVGI instructors at Canoa Ranch and Torres Blancas.

“My main focus is to get the player in balance,” Przymierski explains to her students, which are almost the exact words you will hear when you talk to Blaisdell, Ping and Minzuno National Clubfitter of the Year.

Blaidsell now works hand in hand with Przymierski Sunday through Tuesday each week at Canoa Ranch by appointment, which can be made, just like their lesson packages, through their Web site at www.gvazgolf.com, or by calling 1-800-427-9189.

“If you can’t start in balance,” he says, “everything is manipulation.”

If the club is too short for you, Blaisdell explains, you will get a glancing blow; too heavy for you, you hit it to the right; too stiff, you can’t keep it in the center.

He’ll note your shape right down to the size of your hands, have you hit some balls, do some pretty fancy figuring to get just the right dimensions that match you and your swing.

It’s an hour-and-a-half session for $150, and it might be the most important check you ever write for the game you love.

GVGI has added Todd Warren, former Dove Mountain pro, and Ryan Kyger from Blaisdell Performance Systems to provide the same services for players at Torres Blancas Golf Club.

Blaisdell’s experience has convinced him that equipment manufacturers have been putting out sets of clubs for years that, not only don’t match a player’s body or swing, they might possess different flexes in the same set — the 7-iron might be stiffer than the six, for example.

He gets the dimensions just right. It’s also his job to follow up and make sure the manufacturer gets it exact for you, as well.

He works through Ping or can rebuild the set you have, and he does putters, as well — setting the angle to match a player’s dominant eye to bring the path back to center.

Przymierski has paralleled her instruction to prove to students what a difference it makes.

“Most of the world of instruction is trying to fix problems with ill-fitted equipment,” she agrees, noting that most beginners get starter sets and immediately develop incorrect habits from lousy clubs that don’t match their body shape.

She demonstrated how learners hunch over or move their hands and/or elbow out of the proper swing path just because it’s the only way they think they can swing a club too short for them.

The “flying elbow,” she calls it, is when right-handed students extend their right elbow behind them on the back swing too much, resulting in a “thin” shot to the right all the time.

They do it to compensate for too short of a club.

“The pro has to correct all the movements done incorrectly as a result of an improper fit,” she says.

Put simply, the wrong equipment immediately throws you out of balance.

“They think they can figure fixes out on their own,” she added, “and they do — all the wrong ones.”

Green Valley Golf Instruction actually changed its lesson packages to twice a week for an hour to better accommodate the new club-fitting focus for its students.

“We’re training ‘bodies,’” Przymierski emphasized.

Mike Touzeau is a freelance writer for the Green Valley News.