Shooting Over 85? Hit More Drivers — the Right Way

You've heard it a hundred times: drive for show, putt for dough. And there's truth in it. But for the golfer stuck over 85, the round is usually wrecked long before you ever reach the green — the tee ball that leaks into the trees, the penalty drop, the reload, the blow-up hole that eats three good holes in one.

If your driver puts you in jail two or three times a round, no short-game session on earth is bringing those strokes back. You can't get up-and-down from out of bounds.

So here's the advice almost nobody gives: if you shoot over 85, you should be hitting a lot of drivers on the range. You've just been practicing the wrong thing. Stop chasing distance. Start practicing the three things that keep the big number off your card.

1. Keep the ball in play

The driver has exactly one job at your level: give you a chance. A look from the fairway, or at worst a findable lie in the rough. That's it. A tee shot in play is worth far more than twenty extra yards in the trees — and it's not close.

So reframe every rep on the range. Not "how far did that go," but "would that have been in play?" Pick a fairway-width target, and score your session on how many balls you'd actually be hitting your next shot from. When staying in play becomes the goal, your whole tee game changes.

2. Develop a one-way miss

The single thing that quietly ruins amateurs is the two-way miss — sometimes it goes left, sometimes right, and you never know which. When the ball can start either direction, you can't aim, you can't commit, and you can't manage a hole. Every tee shot is a coin flip.

The most freeing feeling in this game is knowing your ball only goes one way. Pick a shape — a fade or a draw — and groove it until the other side simply disappears. Now you can aim down the safe edge, take the trouble completely out of play, and swing freely instead of steering.

On the range, make it a game: pick a target, declare your miss out loud before you swing, and only count the tee shots that start and finish on your side. A reliable one-way miss will save you more shots than any swing tip you'll ever read.

3. Hit the center of the face

Everything above is built on one thing: contact. Center-face strike is where consistency lives — steadier distance, tighter dispersion, less curvature, fewer surprises. And here's the problem: most amateurs have genuinely no idea where they're striking it on the face.

Fix that today. Put impact tape, dry-erase marker, or a light dusting of foot spray on the driver face and hit ten balls. The pattern will tell you everything. Then make center contact the actual goal of the session — not ball flight, not distance, just where you're catching it. Chase the strike, and the control follows it.

How to make the range session count

Put it together and a driver session looks nothing like mindlessly bombing forty balls at nothing:

• Every ball gets a target and a declared miss.
• Play "fairway or not" and keep score — you want a number you can beat next time.
• Use impact tape to check contact every handful of swings.
• Random targets, full pre-shot routine, one ball at a time — like real golf, not a batting cage.

Same club, completely different practice. You're not training distance — you're training a tee shot you can trust when the hole has trouble on both sides.

Why this beats another chipping session

The blow-up hole is the number one handicap killer, and it almost always starts on the tee. Take the doubles and triples off the table and your scores fall faster than any short-game drill can move them — because control off the tee is the foundation everything else is built on. A round without a wreck is a round you can actually score in.

The trick is knowing whether the tee is really your leak. That's what the app is for — it tracks your fairways, your penalties, and exactly where your rounds fall apart across the nine pillars of a great round, so you practice the real problem instead of guessing.