Hi! It's so exciting to get to ask you a few questions. First of all, could you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Absolutely! My name is Eleonor, but I go by Ellie, and I run @puttingwithellie together with my boyfriend Corentin (Coco). I grew up in a golf-crazy family and have played pretty much my whole life. After high school, I went to South Carolina, USA, to play college golf and study, which was one of the greatest adventures of my life (so far). But after four years of college, I was tired of golf and felt that I had lost my love for the sport. It wasn't as fun to play anymore. So I took a break from golf for a year and a half, only to rediscover the joy and love for the sport in the spring of 2021. It was in connection with this that we created Putting with Ellie, to show how amazingly fun golf is and to inspire more people (especially younger people and girls) to start playing.
When I started playing golf again in 2021, the desire to compete returned as well, and last autumn I decided to turn pro. So, in parallel with running our social channels, I am currently training for this summer's tournaments, and my goal is to push myself to see how good I can become as a professional golfer. This naturally also means that a lot of the content we share via social media is based on my own experiences as a golfer and my continued journey as a pro, with all the new lessons and tips that we hope can help others with their golf game.
We have been following you on Instagram for a long time and understand that you are a skilled golfer in general; right now, we are mostly focused on putting.
What are your best tips for keeping your putting going during the off-season?
My best tip is to make sure your putter doesn't gather dust during the winter. It's easy for all the focus to be on swing training and simulator play during the off-season, but I think any time spent on putting, whether it's 10 minutes or 2 hours a week, is a win. The most important thing is simply to spend some amount of time on putting, just to keep it going.
I also understand that many find indoor putting boring or that it's difficult to know what to practice. Here, my best tip is to focus on fundamentals like setup, tempo, routine, and ball start. These are things that are easy to forget once we're out on the course, but they are all very simple things to practice at home and don't require much space or equipment. If you focus on these during the off-season, I believe you will feel much more prepared when the season finally starts because you have your putting fundamentals under control.
Once the courses open up, do you have any tips for exercises you can easily do on the putting green?
Absolutely, there are several different exercises to do outdoors on the putting green, but I would like to recommend two different ones—one for distance control and one for shorter putts—that I personally like to use.
Distance control
Pick a hole and place five tees 3, 6, 9, 12, and 15m away from the hole. Then place an alignment stick (or a golf club) one club-length behind the hole. You get points according to the table below:
- all putts that stop between the hole and the alignment stick count as par
- all putts that you hole count as birdie
- all putts that stop short of the hole or roll past the alignment stick count as bogey
The goal of the exercise is to hit three putts from each tee and finish with the best score possible. If your score ends up over par, you can continue to do the exercise until you manage to go under par, or you can remember your score and try to perform better the next time you do the exercise. This is also an exercise that can be fun to do together with a friend and challenge them to see who can get the best score!
Shorter putts
Pick a hole and place three tees 1, 2, and 3m from the hole. The goal is to hole three putts in a row from each tee. When you miss a putt, you start over but stay at the same tee, and once you have holed three in a row, you move on to the next tee. If you want to make it a little bit harder, you can go back to the previous tee every time you miss a putt. That way, the goal of the exercise becomes to hole nine putts in a row.
Reading a putt is an art, and sometimes it feels like some people sit down behind the ball just for the sake of it. Do you have any tips?
My best tip for reading a putt is to try to look at the slope of the green on a larger scale rather than just reading the putt from behind the ball, as you describe that many do. Sitting down behind the ball definitely gives you a good angle to see the side slope of a putt, but I think it's important to complement this with walking around the hole and reading the green and the putt from different directions.
To share some more concrete tips, here are two steps you can follow to read a putt: first to determine how hard you need to hit the putt, and then to decide which line you want to hit the putt on.
- Look at the putt from the side. I think the easiest way is to read the putt from the "low" side of the hole. From here, it is much easier to judge the length of the putt, but also whether the putt is uphill, downhill, or relatively flat. This helps you establish how hard you want to hit the putt.
- Read the putt from behind the ball. The line you choose to hit the putt on depends to a large extent on how hard you have decided to hit the putt. It is therefore easier to read the side slope and decide how much break you want to play when you know what speed you will hit the putt with.
Last but not least, I would like to advise you to trust your first instinct when reading a putt. Don't overthink it and don't change your mind at the last second. It's easy to doubt your decision when you're standing over the ball, but remember that your decision is based on info from much better angles than the one you have over the ball.
Now, moving on to a completely different thing: what do you think about dress codes on golf courses?
I'm not a big fan of dress codes. First of all, because many dress codes are based on old ideals within golf and haven't kept up at all with the development of the sport. For example, I don't understand why women on tour are allowed to play in skirts, while men on tour must play in long trousers, even when they play in hot temperatures. I also think dress codes create an unnecessary barrier for all new golfers in the sport. It can always be daunting to try a new sport, and if you then also have to worry about dressing a certain way and perhaps even spending more money to buy the "right" clothes to follow dress codes, then I think it's easy for people to just skip playing golf instead. That said, I think it's about being respectful and, for example, not showing up to the golf course in a bikini or shirtless, but I don't think that's a common problem anyway. Golf is a sport, so if you show up to the golf course in the same type of clothes you would wear for other sports, I don't see any problem at all with that. I think an increased understanding of different types of clothing in golf is a must to make it easier for more people to start playing.
What needs to be developed in golf in Sweden so that more people start playing?
This is a very difficult question to answer, and I'm sure there are several different things that can be improved. I believe that the cost of playing golf is something that makes it difficult to attract new golfers, especially when it comes to getting more young people to start playing. Different types of initiatives to introduce golf to children at an early age—in collaboration with school sports, for example—I believe is a key to getting more people to dare to give golf a chance. Today, golf is unfortunately often seen as a sport only for the elderly or those with a lot of money, but I believe that if we can give young people the opportunity to start playing at an early age, there is a better chance that they will continue to play for life, and also that we can change many people's preconceived notions about golf. I hope that I and Coco, through our social media, can be part of breaking stereotypes in golf and inspire more people to dare to give golf a chance.
Who do you think will win the Masters?
Xander Schauffele. But I am a big Rory fan and hope a little extra every year that he will manage to win the Masters and thus also complete a career grand slam.
We say a big thank you to Ellie and encourage you all to follow her on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/puttingwithellie/
And visit the website: https://www.puttingwithellie.com