This driving range freebie was my favorite golf item I used this year

At GOLF.com, we stumble across all sorts of goodies. Here, we unveil some of our favorites from the past year.

Oftentimes, some of the best golf aids are sitting there in the corner of the house, staring at us in the face. The common, 12-inch ruler. The bathroom mirror. The living room wall! My top training aid is a little farther away. Not quite 10 feet, more like 200 yards. 

While I don’t live the blessed life of being a country club member, I do live right next to a driving range. The Diversey Driving Range, in Chicago, to be exact, a municipally-owned money machine. I don’t know how much money this driving range makes, with its heat lamps working double-time this chilly week, and its upper level of hitting bays maxed out during the summer, but I know it makes money. It has to. I sit in my apartment and look out at little white balls flying through the air all day long. 

While I spend way too much money at Diversey, thanks to its lacking an annual membership and my frequent Tuesday night boredom, I think my proximity to the joint has altered more than just my recent scores. It has (hopefully) fixed my sway, from a surprising source. 

You see, as a high-speed, occasional slicer of the ball, there is room for improvement. It rests in my tempo — often too quick — and also the amount of sliding my hips do during the swing. To create power — that is, to load during the backswing and push upward and forward (slightly) during the downswing — there is naturally a bit of lateral hip movement. The issue takes place when that sway becomes immense, or when it beings to move out of sync with the top half of your body. 

Enter the Diversey Driving Range bag stands. They’re unlike anything I’ve seen anywhere else — iron half-cylinders painted Masters green and peeling from rust — with eyeholes punched throughout to add some semblance of a pleasing aesthetic. But what they lack in appearance they make up for in zero-dollar efficiency. They are sway eliminators. 

The bag stands at Diversey stand 90 degrees upright and are wide enough for anyone to squeeze inside of. There is extra space at their base, so once you step inside, you can take a comfy stance. They stand about three feet off the ground, the perfect height to hug your hips as you mimic a swing. In essence, they are a barrel, and thinking about swinging with your lower body in a barrel can do you a lot of good. 

It’s an old tip that Paula Creamer gave me years ago. She has battled sliding hips herself! But the whole idea is, if you are going to create power to hit a golf ball while your lower half is in a barrel, it has to start with a full rotation of your hips, not lateral sway. The barrel only lets your hips move so far, so completing a backswing requires them to turn more and more, and then to recoil from within the same tiny space. 

Standing on the driving range, these barrels are always in your periphery, a nice reminder that if I was hitting from within one, I had better rotate. Another reminder came from the hitting bay next to me. My partner recently took up the game and, thanks to using my clubs at the start, battled the same bit of sway that a lot of beginners struggle with. My clubs were a bit on the heavy side for her, and in order to get the club face back away from the ball and to bring some power forward, the natural move was to slide her hips in that direction, too. 

The result of increased sway, particularly for beginners, can be twofold. Firstly, there would be a tendency for your hips to push too far forward of your hands in the downswing, as you’ve created a ton of lateral axis space for them to slide back forward, out of synch with the rest of your swing. But more simply, it can just lead to you resetting where the bottom (the strike area) of your swing is. Once the bottom of your swing shifts away from where it starts (right behind the ball) you’re asking for chunked and thinned shots.

It’s the kind of movement you might only see on slow-motion video, but we saw it that day. Sure enough, once the swing-in-a-barrel tip came out, and my trusty Diversey range stands were right there on-hand for a demonstration, it was the perfect swing-thought for my partner to start making better contact. Of course, it helped that the local teaching pro walked by and completely agreed with the theory. Even better yet: Paula Creamer’s breakdown of it below: