Jason Guss, PGADirector of Instruction,Naperville (Illinois) Country Club
Jason Guss has a simple analogy for what happens when a student’s putting game goes sideways.
“It’s like when your computer stops working,” says the Chicago-area instructor and three-time Michigan PGA Section Teacher & Coach of the Year. “You don’t throw it out the window. You turn it off and turn it back on.”
For Guss, the restart button is a putting mat – a low-tech training aid that sits on the floor of his studio and travels easily to the practice green. It has a putter outline, a face-alignment line, and a start gate built into the design.
“The goal isn’t a perfect putting stroke,” says Guss, the PGA of America Director of Instruction at Naperville (Illinois) Country Club. “Most people don’t have the time to build one. The goal is to learn your tendencies and then manage them.”
That distinction drives everything about how Guss structures his putting instruction. Rather than prescribing a universal technique, he uses training aids to give students a clear picture of what their own stroke is actually doing, then builds a maintenance program they can run themselves between lessons and on the course.
The mat (pictured) is where that process starts. A student steps on, sets the putter face square to the alignment line, and hits a few putts through the gate of tees. If the ball catches the left post of the gate, it means the face was closed through impact, or the path was too far inside-out. A putt that catches the right post points to the opposite problem. The mat doesn’t lie – and because the student is reading the feedback themselves, the lesson sticks differently than it would if Guss simply told them what was wrong.
“You can stop at different points in the backswing and see where the face is,” says Guss. “You can see if you’re way inside the line or way outside the line. It’s one of the few things in golf instruction where you actually have a tool that lets you perfectly check where you are.”
Most recreational players get trapped in a cycle of compensations. A player might have a tendency to aim left, which leads to a misunderstanding of why the ball is going left and an attempt to hold the face open to compensate. Adjustments layer on top of adjustments until the whole system needs a reboot. For Guss’ students, getting back on the mat, squaring the face and getting the true visual reinforcement is the reset.
A student who can identify whether their miss is a face issue or a path issue – without waiting for his or her next lesson – is a student who improves faster and retains more.
“You start putting bad, you get on the mat,” Guss says. “Get the face lined up. Hit some putts. See what side of the gate they’re hitting. Now you know whether it’s the face or the path, and you can start working on the right thing.”
For coaches looking to sharpen their own putting instruction, Guss has a similarly direct prescription: Watch more putts before you say a word. “A lot of people are setting up a specific way because of a miss,” he says. “Figure out the pattern first. Then build the practice routine around that pattern.”
The mat doesn’t replace the lesson. But it provides the concrete foundation for the work a teacher does – whether it’s on carpet, wood or grass.
