to my first blog in English. On this page I want to share my knowledge with other golf pros. As a start I’d like to introduce myself:
My name is Oliver Heuler and I live in Waren, Germany. I am running a golf school with 19 pros at the
Golf & Country Club Fleesensee, which has 72 holes and Europe’s biggest driving range.
The beautiful
Fleesensee resort has three hotels, a spa and of course the lake for water sports.
1987 I started my apprenticeship near Hamburg right after school when I was 20. At the time
Denis Pugh was giving seminars in Hamburg every month and I attended each one of them. I immediately bought my first video 8 camera and a 4 head video recorder with a jog shuttle. At that time I was the best equipped pro in Germany. I filmed almost every amateur in my club and traveled to the tournaments of the European Tour to film the tour players.
1990 I began teaching my first scratch golfers in the team of the golf club in Donaueschingen. In this club I worked with Ian McCrea who is a good friend of Hank Haney, whom I met in 1991 at Milan at my first international teaching conference. In 1993 I started my first big tour around America to visit most of the pros I had seen in Milan. I took lessons from pros like Michael Hebron, Jimmy Ballard and Jim McLean. But it became apparent that this building-oriented teaching was not the kind of work I wanted to rely on the rest of my career.
When I visited Hank Haney in Dallas, watched him teach and took lessons from him, I knew that this ball flight-oriented approach was a lot more satisfying for both teacher and student. I visited Hank for 8 years and watched him teach for countless hours.
Fortunately John Jacobs ran his golf schools in my club and I could also watch him teach.
As a German I had to put all this knowledge in a structured system and had to define an accurate terminology. After I did that, I wrote
a lot of books. Most of them were translated into foreign languages:
In 1995 I gave my first international presentation at the European Teaching and Coaching summit in Spain. The title was: »Fixing and building by using arms and body«. I wanted to end the debate about whether arms or body are more important and whether a teacher should fix or build, because naturally he should do both.
After being a regional coach for the best juniors in Südbaden, I became the first full-time Landestrainer for Baden-Württemberg and after that the first full-time national coach of Germany. It took me five years to discover that working with juniors was not really my talent and so I quit. I started my first golf school for average golfers in 2000 and I am still enjoying to teach the typical slicer or shanker.
At Fleesensee I could finally use the
scope video system that I had developed years ago. Here you get the picture of the student’s swing within 0.9 seconds. Moreover the student has a monitor in front of his feet to get live feedback:
In 2001 my colleagues voted Bernhard Langer and me as professionals of the year — Bernhard as a player of course and me as a teacher.
In 2003 I got my second invitation as a speaker for the European Teaching and Coaching Conference. Fortunately the whole event was filmed and is now available at Google Video. This will be the first video in this blog and I hope to produce a lot more in the near future.
Last year the German Golf channel Premiere showed
14 two-minute-clips, but of course they are in German.
I just finished writing the German teaching manual and I hope to share all the ideas of the book in this blog by producing videos in English. I ordered a semi professional high-definition, high-speed (200 fps) camera from Sony which should arrive this week:
Labels: Golf, Video
