The Player Development Index will change your golf life

It is hard to count them all if you really think about it.

Think about how many times you have swung a golf club in your life. All rounds of play. Driving range sessions. TopGolf outings. Practice swings! Messing around. Even moving your body without an actual club in your hands.

I’d guess that the average golfer eclipses 100,000 by their 30s. Easily. I’m midway through mine and have at least executed my swing long enough to know its flaws and strengths, at least as I perceive them. But who am I to judge what is actually a flaw, a strength, something in between, or something that could be improved?

Imagine having all of that information, the information you need to get better at golf, broken down for you in intricate detail.

We all go to the range and work out what we think is wrong with our games, but at the end of the day addressing any would-be problem is impossible to do if you don’t know what the problems actually are.

Like many of you, I found myself in this predicament with my own game.

Scores weren’t what I wanted them to be, and I couldn’t quite crack the code. Scores in general, fairways hit, and greens in regulation are all important measurements in the world of golf, but I needed more information.

Frankly, I needed more data.

I needed a way to uncover all of this information relative to myself. Surely there was a way to figure out what needed fixing.

Oh, there is a way.

The Player Development Index is defined as, per their website, a tool to objectively measure and track an athlete’s physical, golf and mental skills.

I am all about objective measurements in life. Whether it is in my professional career covering golf and the Dallas Cowboys or in my personal day-to-day operation, objectivity and objective data serve as serious points of guidance for me.

Interestingly, I was able to marry all of these things together with the Player Development Index. I traveled to Frisco, Texas, where the Cowboys hold their world headquarters in The Star, and specifically to The Trails of Frisco to meet with Travis Lynch, a certified PDI Coach.

Here is how Travis laid out the training process to me.

“So, it’s just an overview of your game, and it’s going to rate you from zero to 100. So we’re going to go over a lot of things. You’ve already completed your mental assessment. Then we’re going to go over a functional body screening; there’s four exercises there. We’re going to go with a driver swing. You’re going to hit all nine ball flights with an iron. We’re going to do a putting assessment and then a chipping assessment. It’s going to grade you 0 to 100, like I said. You know, our typical mid-level golfer is going to be anywhere between 40 to 50. A D1-level golfer is going to be somewhere around 70. Your tour pros are going to be anywhere between high 80s and low 90s. Nobody’s ever 100, so don’t think you’re coming in here getting 100, but it’s just our baseline snapshot for improvement.” — Travis Lynch, PDI Coach

Travis mentioned a mental assessment, and that is an important part of the PDI evaluation as there is an extreme mental component to the game of golf (I’m certainly not breaking any news to you here). When you undergo the PDI process you do indeed complete an evaluation ahead of time that asks you a series of questions designed to assess the role your mentality plays in your game.

Once we got to the physical portion of the assessment things were indeed physical. I went through the four exercises that Travis instructed me to so that he could assess my athletic foundation. Then it was time to work on shots and see what I could do.

All told the physical portion of the exam was really fun and challenging. We each have individual golf journeys, but personally I don’t have much time to get on the range or in the lab to work. I’m a husband and father, and obviously I have professional commitments and whatnot. You have your own things in your own life. When I play golf it is typically the same process and so I don’t ever encounter some of the shots and manipulations that the PDI assessment put me through which is why the process was so valuable and enlightening to me. It helped me see firsthand, particularly with Travis’ coaching, where my weaknesses and strengths were, ones I both knew about and had no idea of.

“So it’s a non-biased approach on your skills. So everybody’s going to go through the same thing; it’s the same parameters. There’s no second-guessing if you did things the right way or not. It’s a yes or a no, or it’s in a range. So it’s going to give you the nearest point to where you land with everybody else. And without a college coach seeing you play, they can watch and they can see your numbers and they can see where you are on this scale, and they get a pretty good picture of who that player is before they go see him. And then when they go watch them, they can kind of look for some of these cues that maybe you’ve gone through, maybe you can share with that coach as well. And then you can put a roadmap together on how to improve that.” — Travis Lynch, PDI Coach

This is where PDI is of most value in my mind. As noted we all have balls in the air of life, and for as much as we love golf it is hard to find a way to improve while juggling them all. PDI did that through this examination and will continue to do so for me with the coaching provided in their app.

Travis was right in noting that I would not score 100 (I tried). I’ve always been a slicer, and I was able to move the ball left to right with relative ease. Shocking to myself I was also able to keep things relatively straight when he asked. The thing I was most surprised about was that I was able to keep shots as low as he instructed me to in certain moments. I didn’t know that I had those shots in my bag and the PDI assessment helped me learn something new about my game before actually analyzing me.

In terms of its analysis though, I really need to work on my movement in the other direction; however, the mental confidence I have (as noted by the assessment) has me considering that I may lean in, no pun intended, to the shots that I can hit. If I’m in a situation where a ball flight is required that I don’t have, I’m confident enough in both myself and my game, as PDI proved, to not create a problem where there isn’t one. I can utilize the strengths I do have to make matters more easy for scoring purposes.

Unfortunately for me, PDI noted that I have some work to do on the athletic testing front. I’ve got a lot of power in my game and that information is really helpful so that I can tie things together properly. Basically I’ve got to get in the gym. Doctor’s PDI’s orders!

The PDI app provides assignments that are tailored to me, and to anyone who undergoes the process obviously, and to help me improve in my areas of weakness. Now I know exactly what I need to work on in order to get better at golf, and I don’t have to stress about the how I can even begin to come to that conclusion myself. PDI helped me see all of this, and more than anything they made my process towards improvement more efficient because now I know exactly how to improve my game. If I only have an hour now it will be purposeful and not just random guessing which has always been the case for me.

You can look for a PDI Coach in your area by scanning their website right here. It is something that is extremely worth your time in my opinion.

Now I’m off to work on my golf game, and for the first time in a while I will actually be working towards something.