Rinker’s Golf Tips June 22 Top 100 Teacher Todd Anderson. Todd Anderson grew up in Michigan and played all sports growing up including golf with his dad in the summertime. He ended up going to the University of Alabama and played on the golf team there with my brother Lee and Steve Lowery. Todd currently works with some of the players on the Alabama golf team which has won the last two NCAA Championships. Three of the players, Cory Whitsett, Bobby Wyatt, and Trey Mullinax are moving to Sea Island where Todd is the Director of Instruction at the Sea Island Golf Performance Center. Todd has assembled quite a team at Sea Island with Dr. Morris Pickens, Randy Meyers, two national club-fitters, and Jack Lumpkin who asked Todd to come and take over in 2004. Todd was at the Breakers in Palm Beach before Sea Island and he said he learned a lot there teaching full time. Todd’s roots go back to the North River Yacht Club in Tuscaloosa, Alabama where he first met a group of Golf Digest distinguished teachers including Bob Toski, Jim Flick, David Love Jr., Peter Kostis, Hank Johnson, Jack Lumpkin, and Scott Davenport which is probably the greatest group of instructors ever assembled as a team. Todd would work for the Golf Digest Schools and said that he was exposed to a lot of different styles of teaching and ways to approach teaching. He was able to pick and choose pieces from each teacher and develop a system for his teaching.
I asked Todd to tell a story about my mentor of 38 years, Bob Toski, and he went back to a time when he was the Director Administrator of the Golf Digest Schools and his main job was to keep Toski on time. If they lined up six students for a one hour time slot, that meant Toski would spend approximately 10 minutes with each student. If Toski took 20 minutes with the first person there could be an issue getting to all six students in the hour. So Toski asks Todd, “What are we paying you for?” and after a few moments, Toski says, “We are paying you to teach,” which kind of surprised Todd. So the Mouse says, you start on one end of the range and I’ll go to the other and we will meet in the middle. And then Tosk says, “Don’t worry, you can’t screw them up so bad that I can’t fix them.” So Todd finds one guy who is slicing it big time, he strengthens his grip, gets a lighter grip, and the guy starts hitting it a lot better. Later in the day Todd runs into the guy and asks him how his day went. He said boy Toski really helped me. He told me to lighten my grip a little more and I started hitting it great. Funny how the same tip is remembered only from the more credible source. Todd went on to give many accolades to Bob Toski including that Bob builds up people around him and downplays his role, when he is “the man” the pioneer, who started golf schools in the 1970’s with a Who’s Who of great teachers at Golf Digest.
I asked Todd his philosophies on teaching and he said that 1) He wants people to understand where they are in their ability to hit golf shots and their strengths and weaknesses, 2) Goals where do they want to go and how much time do they have to give, 3) Plan to achieve those realistic goals and also need to know of limitations physically including flexibility. We discussed new technologies including Trackman and how alignment is very important with good players, because two to three degrees off, and it skews the numbers. Finding out the cause is the key to good teachers. Have to be able to communicate to students and the difference comes down to whether or not they can change the look and the numbers in the direction that helps the student. Todd says he still likes to look at the ball flight and the swing shape before looking at numbers. I couldn’t agree more. Todd Anderson can be reached at his web site www.tagolf.org.