Finding the time

Keen young golfer Benjamin Stelzer lets us in on a few of his secrets on how to keep your game in shape without leaving your home

Golf net

As a teenager, the majority of my week is spent on schoolwork, maintaining a social life and aggravating my parents. Finding time each week to get in a couple of visits to the driving range and a lift to my club on the weekends is proving to be a real struggle. Bearing this in mind I needed to find other ways to play and improve my game within the vicinity of my own home.

My first step forward was purchasing some orange air balls. To my parent's regret I began to use them around the house, in the garden and even in my bedroom. Not surprisingly there were numerous complaints about damaging floors with overly aggressive swings. After some quick thinking, I retrieved the doormat from outside the front of my house and relocated it to my bedroom, leaving me being able to hit balls off it against a bed sheet that I had hung up against my cupboard.

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However, being limited to just wedges in the home wasn't good enough and I was eager to move outside. The next stage was creating a practice net. This was easily done by using an old bed sheet and hanging it taut between two pieces of my fence. This concept worked so well, I was even able to use proper golf balls against it.

I now had practice areas for both my long and short game but sensed something was still missing - improving accuracy. This is where my trampoline came to use. After being left for the whole winter it did not have much bounce left in it and it proved perfect for landing flop shots and high chips as it had a net round it.

Due to some imaginative thinking, I have now created a practice course within my own home and don't now need to rely on the availability of anyone else but myself.

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