Golf Button

The range rewards the wrong habit

Hitting the same club forty times in a row feels like progress. It is close to the least useful thing you can do with a bucket.

Golf Button gives you a different club every swing. That is the whole app.

Why a bucket of 7 irons flatters you

Hit one club repeatedly and you stop making a decision. Rhythm builds, contact tightens, and the session feels good by the end of it. That improvement is real, but it is shallow. You are rehearsing a swing you have already grooved, under conditions the course will never hand you.

Motor learning research calls this blocked practice. Its opposite, mixing skills so you rarely repeat the same one twice, is variable or random practice, and the effect it produces has a name: contextual interference.

The finding is consistent and deeply counterintuitive. Blocked practice produces better performance during the session and worse performance later. Variable practice feels clumsier while you are doing it and holds up better when you are tested — which, for golf, means on the course.

Same forty balls. The one on the right asks you to commit to a new club, a new number and a new swing every time — the way the course does.

The course never gives you the same shot twice

You do not hit nine consecutive 8 irons on a golf course. You hit a driver, then wait, then a 6 iron off a downslope, then a wedge from 84 yards. Every shot is a fresh decision made cold, once, with no rehearsal.

That is the skill worth practising, and a bucket of one club never touches it.

What the button does about it

Six modes. Three are range drills, three walk you around a golf course from the mat.

Random

Any club in your bag, every press. The simplest way to stop repeating yourself.

No repeats

Works through every club in play before any of them comes round again.

Yardages

Gives you a number instead of a club and leaves the choice to you. On the course nobody tells you it is a 7 iron.

Full course

Eighteen holes off the blue tees, 6,400 yards. It tracks the hole, the par, the yardage and how far you have left, and calls the club the shot actually needs.

Par 3s

Eighteen one shot holes from 90 to 210 yards. Nothing but approach shots.

Real round

The same course with the misses in it: out of bounds, trees, punch outs, greenside bunkers. How often they turn up is scaled to your handicap.

It runs on your numbers, not average ones

Tell it how far you carry a 7 iron and every other club and every hole scales from that. A 120 yard 7 iron gets a course it can actually reach; a 175 yard 7 iron gets a longer one. Tell it your handicap and the misses arrive at roughly the rate you make them.

Pick the clubs that are genuinely in your bag, down to the loft on each wedge, and it will never hand you a club you did not bring.

How to use it at the range

Prop the phone against your bag where you can see it. Press, read the club, hit that shot, press again. Do not repeat one because it went badly — the miss is the point. Take your normal time between shots.

Add it to your home screen and it works with no signal, which most ranges are short of.