Philosophy of Teaching a “Tetra Golf Swing”
As instructors, it is not our responsibility to hand you the swing of Ben Hogan or Tiger Woods or Rory McIlroy. It is our responsibility to give you enough of the rules of the swing for you to understand 1) What happens when you miss then 2) How to correct your miss and then for the more advanced player 3) How to “miss on purpose.”
To learn how to eliminate your slice, the Golfer must first understand the motions and movements that cause a slice to occur. The Golfer then must deliberately make a different motion to remove the cause in which a slice occurs. As a new motion produces a different ball flight, the Golfer begins to learn the “cause to the effect.” In this way, the Golfer can begin to manipulate the ball flight on purpose to produce the desired spin and perhaps additional ball speed.
Tetra Golf is about building a building from the foundation upward. At first, we discuss the foundation of all things within the swing and then build our three story structure from there.
The Foundation: Everything that we do before we make a golf swing. This includes the grip, stance, ball position, posture, and what we had for lunch.
Story One: The Golfer learns the relationship between cause and effect as they push their weight to the right or to the left. In doing so, they realize the force of their momentum dictates the direction.
Story Two: The Golfer learns “how” to push their weight in different directions as they twist and turn to manipulate the overall effect (the path of the club and rotation of the club face).
Story Three: The Golfer learns the overall path of the club is the “effect” of the swing of the body and not the macro-level “cause” of the ball flight.
Story Four (the Penthouse): If the Golfer reaches the penthouse, they will learn how perfecting the stories below allows the golfer to manipulate the entire swing plane autonomously. PGA Tour players live here.
As we move from the Foundation through each level, the relationship between cause and effect scales to produce the desired ball flight. If we do something incorrect in our Foundation, the direction we push our weight is negatively impacted. By rule, a compensation must be made in the motion of the swing that counter-balances any incorrect position. Tetra Golf focuses on the math but also subsequent body motions that create a hypothetical “perfect swing.” We hypothesize but more-so in a way to discuss the compensations to be made as motions “relative to the perfect swing.” First we must understand what perfect is and that we will never possess “perfect.” However, from shot-to-shot we can creep closer and closer.
Other Tetra Golf Projects
Our hope is for Tetra Golf to expand beyond instruction. Logic rules our reality and therefore the golfer’s universe. At Tetra, we hope to provide simple solutions to complicated problems and bridge gaps that separate tradition from progression into the future.
One of those projects includes building an algorithm that solves an age-old problem. “How can golfers compete that play different courses from different tees? Or, specifically, how can women ‘equitably’ compete against men from different tees on the same course?”
Course Comparative Scoring is a programmable algorithm that allows players to compete from different tees and/or from a completely different course under completely different conditions. The solution to this age-old problem would evolve into, like all sports, a betting line where wages can be placed between rounds of golf played all across the globe on different tours. Who knows, perhaps Tetra Golf Math can answer the question, “Who is the greatest of All Time, Jack or Tiger?” Course Comparative scoring has the ability to quantify greatest down to a single stroke of genius given dependent and independent variables within a set of parameters.
Beyond course comparative scoring, we at Tetra Golf hope to also design and build a tee sheet and point of sale system that utilizes the needs of the golfer while equally factoring the needs of the golf course that adopts our system. Inverse of but compatible with dynamic pricing, this booking engine would provide the optimal customer experience through dynamic tee sheet utilization metrics.
Other Projects by Founder
The Founder of Tetra Golf, Blaine Stewart, has published academic pieces. You can find these items online on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other bookstores www.authorblainestewart.com.
Theming with the Tetra Mantra of “unlock the secrets of the swing,” Blaine built an encryption based scavenger hunt application available on the App Store. You can find more about this fun adventure app at www.pyratex.net.