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It has been well over a year since Lucas Herbert, the Australian golfer who won the Irish Open last week and is playing in this week’s Scottish Open, hit balls in front of his swing coach, Dominic Azzopardi.
With Herbert living in Orlando, Fla., and Azzopardi in Western Australia, traveling has not been possible, particularly with a strict quarantine for people entering Australia.
The men went virtual last summer, using the golf teaching app Skillest during the lockdown to film Herbert’s swings, send annotated feedback from coach to player and even have live sessions — albeit early morning for Herbert and late night for Azzopardi. The men, who missed working side-by-side, said the system had worked surprisingly well.
“It’s 10:30 p.m. in the evening here, and Lucas is about to go and practice at 8:30 a.m., so the time zones make it so different,” Azzopardi said. “Instead, I wake up and see his swings, view them, draw lines on them and do a voice-over. It’s just been a really easy way to communicate.”
And Stephen Ames, who won the Players Championship in 2006 and now plays on the PGA Tour Champions, said that during lockdown at home in Trinidad and Tobago he began scrolling through Instagram like other bored golfers. He landed on an instructor in Canada, Shauheen Nakhjavani, and liked what he was posting.
Pretty soon they were mixing in-person and virtual coaching. “It’s not that coaches are hands on,” Ames said. “They’re looking with their eyes. And I realized it was the same with the camera.”
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