Why does this Sentry competitor try the unusual practice of shooting from the front

Collin Morikawa knocking down flagpoles with irons is nothing new, but he has a new way to help him do it this week at Sentry.

Morikawa didn’t qualify in 2024, but he finished second in the Tour Championship and matched his career high with eight top 10 finishes. And he did it all in his worst year on Tour, finishing 44th in strokes gained: a close finish after finishing outside the top four in his first four years on the PGA Tour.

So during the offseason, Morikawa used the eight-week break to discuss his game a bit and ended up with a new pre-shoot schedule.

“If you look at a lot of my shots today, I was doing this little set-up thing before a lot of iron shots,” Morikawa said Thursday after opening with a 7-under 66. “Just kind of letting the body find where it needs to be in the shot. But, yeah, it worked, it was good. It wasn’t a two-day thing and I threw it in the trash.”

On many of his shots with irons and fairway woods, before Morikawa returns the club, he drives into his lead leg by rotating his hips wide open to simulate his impact area.

A subtle change, but one that paid big dividends for Morikawa in two and a half laps at Kapalua. With 11 holes of the third round on Saturday, Morikawa suddenly came out of the fifth place in the field: to approach, he got more than 4.3 shots in the field so far. He also missed just two greens through the first 47 holes of the tournament.

On Friday, he explained that he came up with a process to help him avoid injury.

“I’ve been dealing with a few injuries in the back, I’m working on it a little bit here,” he explained after a second-round 65. “I think if I try again— not to joke about it, but your body gets used to certain positions. , and we do so many repetitions with our bodies, that sometimes you just form bad patterns.

“I just had to tell myself that I can turn around and stay in that situation and that’s what you really do. I don’t think about it. It says, okay, it’s safe to go there, just leave it. And it was good to see the cut back a little more than a little more space. “

On Saturday, during an interview with NBC’s Todd Lewis, Morikawa called it a shot and said it puts him in a good frame of mind this week.

“It’s just a little reason to say, ‘Okay, let the body go there,'” he said. “And let me just send the ball where I want. No imagination really. Just do it and let it happen.”

As Morikawa and Hideki Matsuyama pulled four shots out of bounds midway through the third round, it was clear that the new trigger was working.

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