Walk into golf as a new player and the advice arrives like a fire hose. Keep your head down, left arm straight, shift your weight, bend your knees, slow your tempo, follow through. All of it gets shouted at once, most of it is half right, and none of it tells you where to actually put your attention in your first month. The two of us have taught more than 10,000 lessons between us, a fair share of them to people holding a club for the first time, and we have watched the same handful of early decisions separate the beginners who fall in love with this game from the ones who quit by August.
So this is not another list of swing tips. The swing matters less in your first season than almost anyone tells you. What matters is where you spend your limited practice time, what you buy and what you skip, how you behave on the course so you actually enjoy being there, and what counts as a good day when you are new. Get those right and the swing has room to grow. Get them wrong and you will spend a year frustrated by problems you never needed to have.
Start With the Club You’ll Use Most, Not the One That’s Most Fun
Almost every new golfer reaches for the driver first, because crushing one down the range feels like playing golf. It is also the longest, least forgiving club in the bag, and learning the game through it is like learning to drive in a race car. Thomas starts every brand-new student with a wedge and a 7 iron, nothing longer, because the shorter the club the easier it is to make solid contact, and solid contact is the single feeling a beginner needs to chase before anything else.
Here is the order we teach, and it has not changed in years. Putting first, because half of golf happens on the green and it requires no athleticism to start. Then short chips around the green, because they teach you how the club interacts with the ground. Then the 7 iron, because it is the most teachable full swing in the bag. The driver comes last, once you can already make a decent pass at the ball. A beginner who follows that order is breaking 100 while the driver-first crowd is still topping it into the pond.
You Don’t Need a Full Set to Start
The golf industry would love for you to buy fourteen clubs, a rangefinder, and a new bag before your first lesson. You need almost none of it. A putter, a wedge, a 7 iron, and either a hybrid or a 5 wood will carry you through months of learning, and a half set keeps you from agonizing over club selection while you are still trying to make contact.
If you are buying, used clubs are completely fine when you are new, and last decade’s models hit nearly as well as this year’s for a fraction of the trouble. What we will gently warn you off is a cheap boxed set with a driver the size of a small melon and irons that all feel identical. They make the game harder, not easier. Borrow before you buy if you can, and when you are ready for a proper set, the smartest move is getting the lie and length checked so the clubs fit you rather than fighting you. None of that requires the most expensive anything. It requires clubs that match your body and your current swing.
How Many Clubs Does a Beginner Actually Need?
The rules let you carry fourteen. A beginner plays better with five or six. Carrying fewer clubs means fewer decisions, and fewer decisions means you can focus on the swing instead of standing over the bag wondering whether this is a 6 or a 7. A putter, a sand wedge, a pitching wedge, a 7 iron, a hybrid, and a driver once you are ready is a complete learning set. You can add the gaps later, when you actually know how far you hit each one.
The Short Game Is Where Beginners Quietly Lose Their Scores
New golfers practice the full swing because it is satisfying and ignore the short game because it is fiddly. Then they get to the course and discover that the round is decided within forty yards of the hole, exactly the zone they never practiced. We see it constantly: a player who can reach the green in regulation once a round but takes three or four shots to get the ball in the hole from just off the edge.
If you give us an hour of your practice week, we would rather you spend forty minutes of it putting and chipping than hammering drivers. Roll putts from three feet until you stop missing them, because short putts are pure confidence and confidence compounds. Chip from a few different lies until the club brushing the grass stops surprising you. This is not glamorous work and it will not feel like progress on the range, but it shows up on the scorecard faster than anything else you can do. The full diagnostic for where your strokes actually go, once you are playing full rounds, lives in our piece on how to get better at golf, and it confirms what we are telling you here almost every time.
Don’t Try to Swing Hard
The most common instinct in a new golfer is to swing as hard as possible, because surely more effort means more distance. It is the opposite. A hard swing moves the strike off the center of the clubface, and an off-center hit travels shorter and crookeder than an easy one struck cleanly. Jack tells his beginners to swing at the effort level they would use to skip a stone, smooth and committed rather than violent, and their distance almost always goes up the moment they slow down.
Speed is something you add later, on purpose, once your contact is reliable. Chasing it on day one just teaches your body to miss faster. If you take nothing else from this section, take the phrase we repeat more than any other on the lesson tee: smooth and solid beats hard and wild, every single round.
Learn the Grip and Setup Before the Swing
Here is the boring truth that no beginner wants to hear: most of what looks like a bad swing is actually a bad starting position. How you hold the club and how you stand to the ball control an enormous amount of what happens next, and they are the two things you can fix without any athletic skill at all. A grip that sits wrong in the hands forces the clubface open or shut before you have even moved, and then your body spends the whole swing trying to rescue it.
We are not going to rebuild your grip in an article, because grip changes need feel and feedback, but we will tell you it is worth getting right early, before bad habits set like concrete. The specific checks for grip, stance, aim, and ball position are laid out in our guide to how to improve your golf swing, and a beginner who nails those four things has removed most of the causes of the slice before it ever develops. That is the real advantage of starting now rather than fixing later. You get to build it correctly the first time.
Golf Etiquette Keeps You From Dreading the Course
Plenty of beginners can hit the ball acceptably and still have a miserable time on the course, because nobody taught them how to behave out there, and the fear of doing something wrong ruins the round. Etiquette is not stuffy tradition. It is mostly about pace and respect, and learning a few basics will make you welcome in any group.
The big one is pace of play. Be ready to hit when it is your turn rather than starting to think about it then, keep up with the group ahead rather than worrying about the group behind, and if you are having a rough hole, pick up the ball and move on. Nobody minds a beginner who plays quickly. Everyone minds a slow one. Beyond pace, the short list is simple: stay still and quiet while someone else is swinging, do not walk across the line of another player’s putt on the green, rake the bunker after you have been in it, and fix the marks your ball makes when it lands on the green. That is most of it. Do those things and experienced players will happily help you with the rest.
What’s a Good Score for a Beginner Golfer?
This question causes more unnecessary discouragement than almost any other, so here is an honest answer. For a true beginner playing eighteen holes on a full-length course, breaking 120 is a real accomplishment, and most new golfers shoot well above that at first. Bogey golf, which is a 90 on a par 72, is a goal that takes most people a few seasons of regular play to reach. If you shoot 105 in your first year of actually playing, you are doing fine.
What we tell every new student is to stop comparing your score to par and start comparing it to your own last few rounds. Par is a professional standard. Your job as a beginner is simply for this month’s scores to be a little lower than last month’s. Measured that way, almost everyone is succeeding, and the game stays fun.
What’s the Average Handicap, and How Far Should You Hit Each Club?
A formal handicap takes a number of rounds to establish, and most beginners do not have one yet, which is completely normal. When people quote an “average” golfer’s handicap somewhere in the mid teens to high teens, remember that figure is for established golfers who play enough to carry a handicap at all. As a beginner you are below that pool, and that is simply where everyone starts.
Distance is the other thing new players obsess over, usually by comparing themselves to people they watch on television. Tour numbers have nothing to do with you. What actually helps your scoring is knowing your own carry distances so you can pick the right club, rather than guessing. Here is a rough starting frame for a newer player, with the firm caveat that yours will differ based on your speed, and that women, seniors, and juniors will sensibly land lower across the board.
| Club | Rough beginner carry | Use it for |
| Pitching wedge | 50 to 80 yards | Short approaches and chips |
| 9 iron | 70 to 95 yards | Controlled approach shots |
| 7 iron | 90 to 120 yards | Your go-to learning club |
| Hybrid or 5 wood | 120 to 160 yards | Longer approaches, tee shots on tight holes |
| Driver | 150 to 210 yards | Open tee shots, once contact is reliable |
Treat those as placeholders until you replace them with your own. The single most useful piece of homework a beginner can do is hit ten balls with each club, ignore the best and worst, and note the middle. That number, not the television number, is what you club off on the course.
Should a Beginner Take Lessons or Learn Alone?
We teach for a living, so weigh this however you like, but the honest answer has a shape worth understanding. A few early lessons are the best money a beginner can spend, not because you cannot learn alone, but because the habits you form in your first months are the ones you will spend years either enjoying or undoing. A coach gets your grip, setup, and contact pointed in the right direction before anything sets wrong, and that head start is worth more than the same lessons taken after a slice has had a season to dig in.
What we do not recommend is the opposite extreme of booking a lesson every week from day one. You improve between lessons, in the repetitions you do on your own, not during the hour itself. A couple of early sessions to build the foundation, then practice, then a check in when something drifts, is the rhythm that works. If you want to see exactly how a coach diagnoses a swing in that first session, we wrote it out in detail, and you can run a fair amount of it yourself. When you are ready for eyes on your game, our one on one lessons start exactly where this article does, with contact and fundamentals rather than fourteen swing thoughts.
How Long Until You’re Actually Decent?
The honest timeline, from watching thousands of beginners move through it, is that a new golfer who practices with any structure can be making consistent contact within a few weeks, playing respectable bogey-ish holes within a season, and genuinely comfortable on the course inside a year. None of that is fast by the standards of someone who wants it now, and all of it is faster than the player who spends that same year swinging hard at drivers and skipping the short game.
Two things will slow you down, and both are avoidable. Practicing only the fun stuff is the first, and we have beaten that drum enough. The second is changing your approach every week based on a new video, because a body needs a few weeks of repetition to absorb any single change, and stacking new ideas on top of each other means none of them ever takes. Pick a small number of things, give them time, and let the progress arrive on its own schedule.
Your First Month, Kept Simple
If you want somewhere to start, here is the plan we would hand a brand-new student. Spend your first two or three sessions on putting and chipping only, getting comfortable with the green and with the club meeting the ground. Add the 7 iron next, swinging at stone-skipping effort and chasing clean contact rather than distance. Get your grip and setup checked early, in person if you can, so they are right before they harden. Play your first few holes with a half set, picking up when a hole gets ugly and focusing entirely on keeping pace and having fun. And measure every round against your own last one, never against par.
That is the whole foundation. The two of us coach players through it all year, indoors through the Chicago winter and on grass when it warms, with golfers coming in from Naperville and the surrounding western and southwest suburbs. You can see how we run lessons in Naperville if you are nearby. And if you are not, the plan above does not need us. It needs a wedge, a 7 iron, a putter, and the patience to build the game in the right order.