In golf, unlike most team sports, there is nowhere to hide. Each blow is an individual decision made in silence, without the possibility of delegating responsibility or hiding the error in the collective. Over the course of four or five hours of competition, the player faces dozens of situations where the technique accumulated in months of practice must coexist with scoreboard pressure, physical fatigue and the management of one’s own emotions. It is, in that sense, one of the sports that most exposes the gap between what an athlete is capable of doing in ideal conditions and what he actually does when something is at stake. That gap has a name in sports psychology: collapse under pressure. And it is, for many specialists, the central problem of performance in this sport.
The gap between performance under controlled conditions and performance under real pressure is one of the central problems facing modern sports coaching. In golf, this gap manifests itself on the decisive hole of a tournament, on the long shot over the water with the score tight, in the last three holes when the body is already showing the wear and tear of hours of concentration. The mechanism is known: pressure alters decision-making, activates mechanisms of overanalysis and disconnects the player from the automatisms he built during months of practice. Those who were not trained to manage that state tend to react instead of act.
Matías Hakim knows that problem from the inside. Coach with more than twenty years of experience, he built his career between Argentina and the United States combining technical coaching and high-level professional fitting. His career began at the Venado Golf Club, where he worked for a decade developing classes for amateur and competitive players, such as Juan Manuel Loureiro, Ramiro García Veiga and Tomás Mendía, whose development was later linked to his incorporation into the golf program at the University of St. Thomas in Miami.
From this accumulated experience, Hakim regularly observes a paradox that continues to surprise even those who have been in the sport for decades: the players who perform best in practice are not always those who compete best. The swing can be flawless, the launch monitor numbers can be solid, the consistency on the driving range can be remarkable. And yet, the moment there is anything at stake, the game disintegrates. “You see many players who show a very high level during practice, but when it comes to competing they mentally block,” says Hakim.
“Performance does not depend solely on technique, but on the player’s ability to understand what produces each result and how to control it under pressure,” he maintains. The distinction is relevant: it is not about adding a mental preparation module at the end of technical training, but rather about understanding that the mental dimension is a constituent part of performance from day one. A player who knows how to execute a shot under ideal conditions but does not understand why he executes it well—what sensation it produces, what decision precedes it—does not have the tools to reproduce it when the situation becomes complicated.
That functional understanding of movement is the basis of the system he developed over two decades. “I started teaching using traditional approaches, but over time I observed that many students improved more quickly when they understood the purpose of each movement,” he explains. The paradigm shift involved leaving aside the mechanical correction of positions to prioritize motor learning based on sensations: understanding what produces each result and how to reproduce it in real game situations, not in the aseptic conditions of the practice field.
In this process, technology played a decisive role. “I really like using it because it allows the player to understand much more quickly what is happening in their swing and performance,” he says. High-speed video analysis, launch data measurement systems and biomechanical analysis tools became a constituent part of its methodology, not as ends in themselves but as instruments to bring the player’s sensations closer to the objective numbers.
The indicator of success that Hakim uses is not the handicap or the number of strokes gained per round. It’s another: “One of the greatest indicators of success is when a player develops the ability to understand what is happening under pressure and work the round based on that information, without trying to make technical changes during the game.” The formulation reveals a conception of the sport that goes beyond technical execution: what is trained is not only the swing, but the lucidity to read the situation and make rational decisions when the context pushes towards an impulsive reaction.
“Golf requires constantly making decisions and managing emotions during several hours of competition,” he summarizes. Few sporting disciplines compress this density of variables into a single event: environmental uncertainty, progressive physical wear and tear, sequential decisions with accumulated consequences, absence of teammates to cushion individual error. In this framework, mental preparation is not an optional complement for high-performance players. It is, according to Hakim, as trainable and as concrete as any technical aspect of the game.
by News Editorial
Image gallery
