HAMILTON – Professional golfers are just like you and me.

If you golf, or — more precisely — if you are even slightly obsessive about golf, there is every possibility that you’ve found yourself falling down one, some, or all of the myriad online rabbit holes that relate to everything that relates to hitting a little round ball around a big green field.

Once you’re down that path, you can find anything: Deep statistical analysis that can turn any single shot into a game of blackjack, with probabilities reduced to a math equation; mystical observations about the mind-body-spirit connection that the golfing priests like to espouse as the game’s differentiating factor; or any number of golf influencers of every flavour. The online world is filled with quick-fix training aids and elite teachers and quacks alike offering help to the needy.

If you are the type to practise your alignment in the mirror or putt in your basement and believe you can discern the nuances of attack angle and swing path on a launch monitor, the ocean of online golf content forever beckons, and there is always the possibility of drifting too far from shore.

I speak because I know.

But a world-class athlete, objectively one of the top 60 golfers in the world, that couldn’t possibly happen to them, could it?

Like, if you are playing golf to feed your family, you’re not noodling around on X (formerly Twitter) looking for swing tips, are you?

Well, let’s turn this over to Mackenzie Hughes.

The two-time PGA Tour winner from Dundas, Ont., is hoping to follow Nick Taylor’s lead from a year ago and keep the RBC Canadian Open trophy at home. Hughes took a giant stride in that direction with a 6-under-par 64 Friday that has him tied for fourth heading into the weekend at Hamilton Golf and Country Club.

But even though Hughes has been on the PGA Tour for eight years, the answer is yes, he has turned to social media to help his game.

The difference? It’s worked for him.

Hughes has even taken it a leap from simply scrolling and favouriting a few clips here and there. He’s moved to the “in real life” phase.

The thoughtful 33-year-old counts not only one but two critical members of his performance team as Twitter-friends-turned-business-associates.

That’s right: Hughes has entrusted his livelihood to a pair of voices he first met online and has since established long-standing working relationships with.

“Yeah, it is very random,” Hughes acknowledged with regard to idea of him assembling part of his performance team though his social feeds.

The first is Mike Carroll, the Ireland-born, California-based strength-and-conditioning expert who has developed a following via his online content to support his well-regarded FitForGolf blog and by the subscription-based app of the same name which he started shortly after emigrating from Ireland to solve a pressing problem: “I was broke,” he says, laughing.

His broader aim was to connect with recreational golfers who could benefit from adding golf-specific training to their fitness routine. His specialty was recognizing the importance of power and speed in the golf swing, and adapting training to maximize it, drawing on literature and expertise from sports with long traditions of training for rotational explosiveness: Javelin, discus and shot put among them.

The second is Jon Sherman, who self-published a book called the Four Foundations of Golf as a compilation of learnings and teaching from his website. Again, Sherman’s broader audience is enthusiastic recreational players who could benefit from better on-course strategy and expectation management. But it turns out his ability to bolster his concepts with an easy-to-digest distillation of the analytics-based approach has resonated beyond weekend hackers trying to win a few skins from their friends.

(Full disclosure: I have followed Sherman and Carroll for years on social media and been a customer too. I can vouch for the quality of their content, but so far my PGA Tour card remains lost in transit, I can only assume.)

Carroll and Hughes first connected four years ago, with Hughes dropping the strength and conditioning coach a cold-call email, while Sherman first heard from Hughes via a direct message last June.

“… I just kind of stumbled across them on Twitter,” says Hughes. “But they obviously did a very good job of putting themselves out there and making their stuff very visible because I found it, and I loved it.”

Neither Carroll or Sherman were planning or expecting to work with a PGA Tour player. Having one reach out to them, looking for help, was initially intimidating.

“He messaged me last June, just saying ‘hey, I really like your content. I know it’s for the average golfer, but every time I read it, it puts me in a good place, do you coach?’” says Sherman. “And I read the message, and it was, like, 80 per cent excitement and 20 per cent panic, like, ‘oh my God, this is so exciting, but I’ve never coached.’”

Carroll’s response was similar. Although he had trained golfers for years and has a degree in sports and exercise science from Ireland’s University of Limerick along with other designations, working with someone whose livelihood is in part dependent on your advice was another matter.

“There was definitely some initial apprehension there, with ‘I hope this goes well and he likes what I suggest and give it a try,’” says Carroll. “And what you’re really dreading is getting a text like, ‘I hurt myself [in the gym] today and I have to pull out of the tournament next week.

That hasn’t happened, and early on Carroll realized that even an experienced touring professional could benefit from the level of coaching he could provide.

“These guys are extremely skilled golfers, but they are not extremely advanced or experienced gym goers,” says Carroll. “So it wasn’t complicated in terms of ‘OK, where am I going to start here to make any progress,’ it was ‘here are some things I think will be beneficial’, and I was confident from that point.”

That Hughes has found such important team members while thumbing through his phone is on one hand surprising, but on the other not when you consider the totality of the professional golf experience.

Unlike a team sport environment where athletes can at least get a base line of support from the franchise they work for and perhaps add from there, professional golfers are independent contractors; they are part of the PGA Tour, but very much on their own to figure out how best to conduct their business. Making the right choices and the investment in areas like technical coaching, nutrition, sports psychology and nutrition can make or break careers.

“I think it’s absolutely imperative to have a great team around you,” says Northern Ireland star Rory McIlroy, who is in the hunt for his third Canadian Open championship this weekend at Hamilton Golf and Country Club. “I’m incredibly lucky that I do. But everyone’s different. Some people have bigger teams. Some people have smaller teams. Some people like having a lot of people around at golf tournaments. Some people don’t. It’s really up to the individual.

“I have a great team that I can lean on, but whenever I get to a tournament venue I try to keep the entourage pretty small. But it’s important. I think with how competitive the game is now and you have to do everything right, from swing coach to short game, to putting, to mental, to physical, training, diet, all of those things combined, because the margins out here are so small, and you just don’t want to feel like you’re giving anyone an advantage in any way.”

But how to build out your team is often a question of trial and error.

“That’s just the thing about [professional] golfers,” says Sherman, who gave up a career in tech sales when his online golf business moved from side hustle to full-time concern in 2019.  “What I’ve found out of working with them is … I think people assume tour players all know who to go to and have these elaborate teams around them, but a lot of them … I think they’re all friendly, but they don’t share too much also at the same time, right? They are competitors. So, you know, it’s on the individual to kind of build their own team around them and see who they want to work with.”

What Carroll and Sherman each offer is a ‘practice-what you preach’ element that adds to their credibility.

In Carroll’s case, he’s been his own test lab when it comes to developing speed and explosiveness. As the likes of Bryson DeChambeau began pushing the envelope regarding the benefits of driving for distance compared with the orthodoxies around  precision and accuracy, Carroll noticed that the notion of training specifically for speed and power in golf was an underserved niche.

He began applying a lot of his training theories to his own game. He was guided by a simple premise: if a discus thrower, for example, is training with a seasonally adjusted combination of heavy, compound lifts and explosive plyometric movements, why shouldn’t a golfer? When he started his project, Carroll was a five handicap with a ball speed in the 160-m.p.h. range: Respectable, but hardly earth-shaking. In the years since, Carroll has improved his ball speed to about 180 m.p.h., which compares favourably to the PGA Tour average of 173.5 m.p.h.. Along the way, he dropped more than seven shots from his stroke index.

So when Hughes and Carroll connect via text, phone, video call and through Carroll’s FitForGolf app – they only meet in person three or four times a year – it’s a conversation with a strength coach who can speak first-hand about building an exceptionally powerful golf swing, rather than one who can’t offer insights from their personal experience.

Something is working: Hughes is averaging 316.7 yards off the tee this week at Hamilton. The season before he started working with Carroll, his driving average was 297.2.

Hughes has added about 10 miles per hour to his maximum ball speed, says Carroll, and while he doesn’t always go full-send on the course, he has more speed to access when he chooses.

“I’ve said this before to many people, but if I can be somewhere in the middle, I guess, strokes gained tee to green, and then kind of be myself on and around the greens, then I think that’s a pretty dangerous combination,” says Hughes.

Similarly, Sherman has applied his own hard-earned lessons to improve from a decent club player to a competitive amateur who last year qualified the U.S. Mid-Amateur Championship, one of the most prestigious competitions of its kind in the world.

During the weeks Hughes is competing, he speaks with Sherman on the Wednesday before the tournament starts to discuss the game plan and mindset, and they talk again after each round. The overall goal is to get better at one of golf’s most difficult skills: staying in the moment and leaving bad shots behind. It is notoriously easier said than done — especially as tournament pressure builds — and requires constant attention.

Each of them agree that the best week they’ve had working together was at the Wells Fargo Championship in early May. Hughes opened with a 73 and was 4-over-par for the tournament when he double-bogeyed his 27^th hole. But he didn’t allow himself to be frustrated and was able to play the next 45 holes in 10-under-par and finish tied for sixth.

“You can kind of get caught up in the fact that you hit a shot from 160 yards to 30 feet, and there are times when you hit that shot and you think, ‘Oh, that wasn’t very good’,” says Hughes. “Then you realize that’s pretty much exactly Tour average and you think to yourself, like, ‘All right, like, I probably don’t need to beat myself up that bad for that.’ I think that while we’re certainly chasing getting better all the time, I think for me a lot of getting better for me is like trying less, which sounds very counterintuitive, but I’ve always been someone that I would never be guilty of not trying hard enough, but I’ve been certainly guilty of trying too hard at times. I think, for me, especially on the golf course, a lot of that is just trying to find that balance, find the appropriate level of effort that brings out your best golf [and], I’ve been doing a pretty good job lately of finding that balance. …  At the Wells Fargo, I walked off on Thursday and I felt like I was trying so, so hard to play well, because I was at home in Charlotte [and] every day from that Thursday on I tried to be a little bit better as far as, like, how hard I was trying and adjust my general care level for how I was doing. The rest of that tournament just got a little bit better and a little bit better as I tried a little bit less. So, it’s funny how that works.”

Funny, too, that Hughes’ game has grown at least in part due to help he first found on social media. In Carroll and Sherman, Hughes has found what he needed, from sources he has come to rely on and can easily relate with.

“I think that I can see that they’re putting into practice a lot of the same stuff that they’re preaching to me,” says Hughes. “Like, Mike’s training the way I’m training, because he’s trying to improve his ball speed and see how he can do it different ways.

“Like, I saw his stuff online, I really liked it and I thought ‘oh, this could be really good’ … and four years later, we’re still working together, and I really enjoy being around him. His knowledge of the game, his knowledge of training is quite high level …

“I think he’s made me stronger, more fit for golf. No pun intended.

“And John’s out there playing high level amateur golf, so he’s trying to keep, let’s say, his tools sharp, because he’s trying to navigate amateur golf in the same way that I’m trying to navigate professional golf, right? He’d be the first one to tell you he’s not a psychologist, but he understands the game at a pretty high level. And I just think the stuff that we talked about is very easy to implement and makes a lot of sense to me, so I think that’s it’s been a great partnership for me and he’s someone that I you know, I’ve grown to really trust.

“… Between the two of them they’ve, they’ve made a nice impact on my game. So you know, I’m thankful to have those guys in my corner.”

So there you have it, next time someone tries to convince you that tumbling around the online world, searching for help with your golf game is time poorly spent, take it from Mackenzie Hughes: Help is out there, if you know where to look.