How to stop first-tee nerves wrecking your opening shot

My story

The first tee at Murwillumbah, my favourite course, is a beautiful tee shot. You stand about 30 metres above the fairway with the whole hole laid out below you. I've never once got to enjoy it.

With kids and a family, getting a full 18 organised takes some doing, so by the time I'm on that tee there's a lot of anticipation riding on the day. It doesn't feel like fear. It feels like excitement, and not wanting to mess it up. Then I rush. I swing too hard, and if the driver's in my hands, it's a massive slice out of bounds or onto a different fairway entirely.

Every single first tee has some version of that feeling. It turns out there's a reason it wrecks the swing, and it isn't the nerves themselves.

What nerves actually do to your swing

Three things stack up on the first tee that never stack up again in the round: you haven't hit a real shot yet, people are watching, and you have no idea how your swing is behaving today.

Two pieces of evidence show what that does:

• The swing shrinks. Golf Digest teacher Tim Mahoney measured 100 of his students on the range and then on the first tee, using Trackman and SportsBox AI. Under nerves, their main aim became simply making contact. 80% turned their hips and chest less, back and through. Their swings got shorter and more arms-driven, their usual misses got bigger, and accuracy dropped by about 20%.
• The rhythm changes. In a small study described by sports psychologists Paul McCarthy and Marc Jones, nine golfers were filmed on the first tee of three club competitions and compared with their practice swings. The one clear pattern: both the backswing and downswing were quicker in competition.

The details differ, and both studies are small. But they agree on the part that matters: under pressure your swing changes, and you don't feel it changing. You think you made your normal swing. You didn't.

The fix: protect your normal swing

Before you reach the tee

• Finish your warm-up with your real rhythm. Last five balls on the range: full turn, normal speed, a target for each.
• Count your rhythm. McCarthy and Jones suggest counting a beat on the backswing and the follow-through. A simple "one... two" gives your swing a tempo that nerves can't quietly change.

On the tee

• Hit the club you trust. Nobody scores your first tee shot for style. A hybrid in the fairway beats a driver in the trees in front of the group.
• Make one full-turn practice swing. Since nerves shrink your turn, rehearse the turn on purpose: chest fully round, then fully through.
• Call it excitement. In a 2014 Harvard study, people who told themselves "I am excited" before singing, public speaking or a maths test performed better than people who tried to calm down. Anxiety and excitement are both high-arousal states, so relabelling one as the other is easier than switching it off. Say it in your head on the walk to the tee. Funnily enough, excitement is already what that Murwillumbah tee feels like to me. The trick is keeping the label and losing the rush.

Drill: rehearse the pressure

On your next range session, make the last three balls count. Pick a fairway between two flags. Before each ball, go through your full first-tee routine, count your rhythm, and score yourself: one point for in the "fairway". Practising the routine under a little pressure is how it holds up under a lot.

Watch the video

See you on the first tee.Try to enjoy the view this time.

Sources

• Luke Kerr-Dineen, Golf Digest via Australian Golf Digest (2023). An experiment on first-tee nerves found 80 percent of golfers make this mistake.
• Paul McCarthy and Marc Jones, via Today's Golfer. How to conquer 1st tee nerves, an excerpt from The Successful Golfer: Practical Fixes for the Mental Game of Golf.
• Brooks AW (2014). Get excited: reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143(3): 1144–1158.