Time for some current news and an update on some of what is in store for Secret In The Dirt in the upcoming weeks and month.  First as you have probably noticed we are now hosting our videos at YouTube.  The idea here is simple.  First the videos are going to be more easily shared throughout the web and will load faster for our friends in more distant parts of the world.  Second and more importantly all of the video in The Vault are now shareable and embeddable.  This makes them more usable now to everyone in forum posts, blogs and profile favorites and it also means that The Vault vids can be used not just in Secret In The Dirt but also pretty much anywhere that golfers talk golf on the web. The best thing a Dirter can do for The Dirt is to make sure that when you find a Vault Video you love whether here or at www.youtube.com/secretinthedirt please share it with your golfing friends.

For quite a while now I have been asked in personal messages and so forth to recommend drills for improving people's golf swings.  I've never been much of a "drill guy" except that in the 90's I became fascinated by Paul Bertholy and his static hold drills.  I thought Bertholy was a genius.  Still do. These were basically like dynamic holds of various positions in the golf swing and I actually pointed to some of those positions and demonstrated them in the original Sevam1 videos on YouTube. If I were to describe Bertholy's approach I would call it a static, macro or whole body approach to positions and drills.  These were essentially dynamic tension exercises tailored to Bertholy's informed vision of the golf swing.  He was revolutionary and largely ignored.  A shame, that is.

Every year around this time all of us up here in the north start to get that nagging itch to tip it up and play some golf.  We want to play but mother nature is just not quite ready to let us have a go out there.  If you can't play, the next best thing you can do is prep to play. To me, prepping for the season is mainly about conditioning and for my kind of swing action 90% of the conditioning I focus on is for the hands wrists and forearms and the legs.

As another year draws to a close and a new one begins it is time to take stock of where we are and to think a little about where we are going. Improvement in golf is an incremental thing. Those of you who have been in The Dirt for a good while know what I am talking about. It happens when players think wide and are open to a wide range of ideas.

Back a couple of years ago now when Elk and I first started to go over a lot of historical information about the golf swing, he was visiting just prior to the Canadian Open and I gave him a copy of one of my favorite books.  My Golfing Album by Henry Cotton.  Ironically he had a copy of this very book on in bookshelf but like many of the hundreds of golf books he'd collected over the years he had never really had the time to really scour through it.  That changed quickly and it soon became a favorite talking piece for us.  So much so that many of the first videos we did For Secret In The Dirt were inspired at least in some ways by what Cotton was all about in this book.
Some of you may remember a piece that we did called "11 Things" which we released on New Years 2010 as a single web page and a PDF.  This was the point when we decided that we would begin to build this website.

There is an old saying in economics that a rising tide lifts all boats.  It's not exactly on point and The Dirt isn't really economics but it is relevant in a way to how I feel about this site.  As Secret In The Dirt grows it has been my goal to help all of our members grow.  First I want their knowledge of this great game to grow. I then want their appreciation of the players and teachers who came before them to grow.  Most importantly through respectful sharing and dialogue I want them to learn here what they need to know in order to improve their games through a new environment of shared experience and social learning.

Today marks the launch of the Caddy For Elk Contest, where you can win a spot as Elk's Caddy during the Pro-Am Round at the Fry's Open in CordeValle Golf Club in San Martin, California on October 5th, 2011. 

Let me take you all back a little bit.  I know I’ve asked you to do this many times but once again I think that it is time to indulge in the past just a little. 

First off apologies for being so tardy with the blog but I think once you read this you will forgive me for being otherwise occupied.  I feel like I’ve said that far too often recently but it can’t be helped…..  Especially, when I get something into my head that has to be turned into something real. When we started Secret In The Dirt, it was with the idea that we would try to create as many ways for golfers to connect as we could.

Shot 84. Ouch!!... But considering that 30% of the field withdrew and less than 20 guys were able to keep it in the 70’s that score actually wasn’t all that bad.….