When it's deep into the season and you're not playing well, it's frustrating. This is when it's time to revisit some basics. The basics are driving and chipping.
If you can do those two things well, you'll be hard to beat. It's rare to mess up a short iron from a fairway that badly. And if you can chip the ball to a foot, your putter doesn't matter.
The beauty is, while you're working on chipping you're also working on driving. This is because the bottoms of both swings — the area around impact — are identical.
From the moment the clubhead is two feet from the ball until two feet after impact, the technique of a good chip is the same as a ripped tee shot. The clubface isn't flipping or doing anything funny.
It's staying square to the path of the swing and striking the ball as solidly as a bat hits a baseball. A good feel is the back of the left hand staying pointed at the target through the strike. Except for flops and a few other specialty shots, that's how every swing with every club should feel at the bottom. It's why you start my practice sessions with simple bump-and-runs. You'll take an 8-iron and make a swing that's as short as a putting stroke and just watch how the ball rockets off the clubface for a yard or so
After you master the square pinch, try some longer chips. Work your way up to a 40-yard pitch,
Go through the bag until you're hitting driver. Same as with the short chip, the way to get maximum speed on a drive is to present the dead middle of the clubface to the ball. When you achieve that, you realize that a full swing is one simple motion that feels like a chip, only with some wrist hinge and body turn. You are a feel player, but paying strict, technical attention to chipping has given the right amount of structure to your swing.
The other half of the scoring equation is, of course, mental. So when you're staring at flags from the fairway this summer, just pretend you're playing catch in the back yard. Or maybe even at the beach.