Why Do So Many Golfers Change Their Swing Coaches

Have you ever wondered why so many of the world's best golfers decide to change their swings - and how often does it actually work out for the best? That's the question that Derek Clements looks at in this week's View From The Fairway.

Why do so many golfers seem to believe that the grass is always greener on the other side? We can all name a leading tour pro who has experienced huge success and then concluded that the time has come to find a new swing coach to "move to the next level".

And I always end up asking myself a simple question: "Why?"

The stand-out example for me was Sandy Lyle. He had a technique that was all his own, but it worked. It worked so well that he won both The Masters and The Open Championship before Nick Faldo. He also won The Players Championship and, for a time, was the best golfer on the planet. But for reasons known only to himself, he got it into his head that he needed to make changes. And he was never the same golfer again.

There have been many others. Faldo was the exception to the rule, a golfer who realised his technique was not good enough to win majors. So he dismantled his swing and, with the help of David Leadbetter, rebuilt it and went on to win six majors.

Leadbetter was one of the coaches Lyle went to but they simply didn’t gel. Lyle was an instinctive golfer and the way that Leadbetter taught the game was robotic. It was an approach that worked for Faldo.

Seve Ballesteros, perhaps the greatest natural talent the game has ever seen, is another who sought the help of numerous coaches. Ditto Justin Rose. At the peak of his powers, Padraig Harrington was always tinkering with his game - and still does.

If Scottie Scheffler turned to a new coach you can bet your bottom dollar that he would be told to change his foot action, but it has worked for him throughout his career. So why would he want to change anything?

And today there are a host of golfers who thought they knew better. It turned out that they did not.

Take Davis Riley, winner of the Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial, one of the most challenging courses on the PGA Tour. Riley’s win came from nowhere. And the reason for his dramatic return to form soon became evident. He revealed after his triumph that he has recently reunited with long-time swing coach Jeff Smith.

Riley said: "We haven’t re-invented the wheel or done anything different. I feel like I’m in a good head space and comfortable there and I feel like simplicity has been the key for me."

There seem to have been a whole host of golfers who have chosen to go back to basics in 2024 - and with positive results.

You don’t need me to tell you that two-time major winner Collin Morikawa has been in something of a slump of late. One of the best iron players in the world, he reached a point where he could barely hit a barn door from 100 yards. It emerged that Morikawa had decided to walk away from lifelong coach Rick Sessinghaus last autumn. Why he would abandon a man who guided him to such glorious and sustained success is anybody’s guess, and Morikawa’s game duly suffered.

The American tried to tell us that his game was in transition. Oh yes? Hmmm…

Ahead of The Masters, Morikawa opted to swallow his pride and contact Sessinghaus, and the results were immediate. He finished tied third at Augusta. And it was no flash in the pan. He was tied 16th at the Wells Fargo, and fourth at the PGA Championship and the Charles Schwab Challenge. 

"I am in a much better mental space now," he said. "And I owe a lot of that to Rick. Obviously joining back up with him, it’s been awesome. It’s not like we’ve done anything new, it’s just being able to talk."

The real puzzler for me was Viktor Hovland. Having enjoyed the season of his life in 2023, Hovland was the latest to decide it was time to try something new. He parted company with Joe Mayo and sought help from Grant Waite. And his game fell to pieces. Asked why he had made the change, Hovland told us that he was a "curious golfer". It was baffling, and the harder Hovland tried, the worse he seemed to get.

The penny dropped and he got back in touch with Mayo the week before the PGA Championship. The result? He finished third in the season’s second major.

"I thought this was potentially going to be a little bit of a project and maybe take six, eight weeks before I would see kind of immediate improvement," Hovland said. Instead he contended for the win all of Sunday. "Yeah, that was kind of best-case scenario right there."

Even Rory McIlroy figures in this conversation. One of the streakiest golfers on the planet, McIlroy started the year in sensational style, finishing first and second in two starts on the DP World Tour. But then he lost it.

(Image Credit: Kevin Diss Photography)

McIlroy opted to struggle on for a while but then he went to see Butch Harmon in Las Vegas. Again, the results were almost instant.

"The work I did with him wasn’t a tremendous amount of changing what he did, it was his attitude and the way he played certain shots," Harmon said on the Son of a Butchpodcast. From "150 yards and in he made a full swing like he was hitting a driver and I wanted him to make more three-quarter swings and chop the follow through off a little."

And the message for the rest of us from all of this? If it ain’t broken, don’t try to fix it.

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