'It's All About Ball Flight, Not Positions' - Lottie Woad's Coach On His Teaching Philosophy And The Secret To Her Success

Luke Bone has been coaching Lottie Woad since she was eight years old. The Farnham Professional has seen Woad become the World No. 1 amateur, win at Augusta where she would birdie the last three holes, and be part of a victorious Curtis Cup team at Sunningdale.

If 2024 was spectacular, then this year has been even more impressive. The amateur star very nearly won a Major at the Evian Championship, she did then win by six shots on the Ladies European Tour in Ireland and, in her first start in the paid ranks, she captured the Scottish Open, a co-sanctioned event with the LPGA Tour. She is now up to 11th in the world and will surely make her Solheim Cup debut next year in the Netherlands.

Here Bone explains some of the reasons Woad has been such a prominent force in the game as well as the lessons that, as club golfers, fans and parents, we can all learn.

Lottie Woad 2025

You might not have expected Lottie to finish third in a Major, win back-to-back events and then finish 8th in the AIG Women's Open but, from a very young age, it never surprised me when she kept hitting that next level – because it was obvious that it was what she was so determined to do.

She would always come back having done the work. It's not always easy to make change, and being a determined young girl, she might get frustrated if it wasn't happening as quickly as she wanted but she had implemented it within the next week or so.

Over those years of doing that you develop a trust between the player and the coach, which is where where we've landed ourselves now, and everything she set out to do as a goal she has achieved so far. I would never have bet against her and I still wouldn't bet against her in what she plans to achieve going forward.

Work Ethic

Lottie's work ethic to achieve, in terms of practice and hitting balls, is unrivalled. I've been on tour with her and at Majors and a tournament week is different to what you see behind the scenes. But even at a tournament week she's first there on the range and we have even had to discuss how to make sure she doesn't tire herself out.

There are a lot of people who work a lot of the time but it's the smart working and the lack of wastage that we're trying to always refine. In terms of form, she's right up there and we need to match that in what areas we work on. There is always the balance of not sacrificing her strengths to work on what could be considered her weaknesses.

This is all relative for a player of Lottie's skills, but you have to look at those marginal gains. She won’t be as reliant on some aspects of her game as her approach play is strong, so there’s always an interesting balance. If you watch Lottie warm up, the intensity which she maintains throughout her practice is again relatively unrivalled from what I've seen on tour so far.

Natural Talent

When people talk about talent I think they're talking about people who swing the club really naturally. I've got plenty of children who I've coached at the age of 12 who swung it 'naturally' better than Lottie did.

For me it's ball flight, impact and the delivery of the club and let's build around that being the task. What's the ball telling us? What's the club telling the ball and then can we adopt a thing for that player? That's going to be more likely that they'll get the job done.

It's working backwards through the thing rather than all these positions that we're told to get into. I've got a guy who I coach now who really can't start his swing. He's got athleticism and power and he's played other sports but, when he swings the club, he's engaging his wrists because he's been told to hinge. And he has an over-exaggerated hip turn in the backswing.

Often people tell me about what they've been working on - their hips or their shoulders - and I'll tell them that the ball doesn't even know that you've got shoulders, let alone whether they've turned or not. So let's start with what the ball's doing and let's start with what the club needs to do to the ball.

Then, what are your patterns with the club and ball, then we can build something form that. I'm not saying that we won't get into how your body's moving, it's relevant, but it's not what Lottie's thinking about when she's smashing the ball down the middle of the fairway. She's trying to smash the ball down the fairway.

Playing With Boys

Obviously there's not as many girls at golf clubs, though Farnham Golf Club is doing a sterling job of addressing this. Lottie's dad, Nick, helped start the junior academy with me and Lottie came through that and he's still running the junior section here. We've got a group of parent volunteers who are hugely engaged and one of the parents' remit is to grow the number of girls within the section.

Because of that, there's more opportunity for girls to play with girls. But that cannot go on at every single level as they want to play more. The integration will have to happen, especially as a junior, because of the sheer numbers of boys and girls playing the game.

But you would never force people to do what they don't want to do either. You should have an environment where the girls feel comfortable and you should have female members who are briefed on how exactly they can help and encourage the juniors.

If you want to play golf, and the environment of golf is an individual sport, that individual is going to play with multiple other individuals over the course of their golfing career. So I don't think that you should be necessarily creating a culture where you can only be comfortable in a certain environment, but certainly visible other girls at a club will make other girls want to join.

It would be great if you said that everyone can just play with whoever they want all the time. But do you always get to play with the person you want to play with in your club? As a pro I won't have a choice in who I'm drawn with so you do need to get used to this side of things.

You've got different characters, male or female, junior or adult, and some are more sensitive and nervous about who they play with, and some people are pretty happy to play with anyone and that's the same throughout life. So you've got to try and provide an environment which people are comfortable in, regardless of who they are, junior boy, junior girl, adult man, adult woman.

Coaching Teenagers

I don't necessarily differentiate too much between the boys and girls. I feel like I treat each person based on the person that I discover and I don't necessarily want to generalise with girls or boys. Boys are going through stuff as well at a teenage age.

There are certainly some traits. If you ask the girls to give you notes after your lesson, you're going to get some pretty good notes off the girls normally and the boys are going to forget to do it.

So there's definitely a little trend there, but the whole point is that that's irrelevant. All I'm doing is trying to make sure that the people that I'm coaching are reflecting correctly and communicating to me in their own way what I've given them to help me next time to coach them better.

Every Player Is Different

I've got a few lads at the moment who I work with who are all getting pretty good and I treat each of them differently. I actually coach each of them very differently because of the way in which they process the information and the way in which it seems to me that they like to learn.

I've got one lad who I will challenge to hit lots of different types of shots. He flushes it and if he thinks too much about his swing, he doesn't flush it as well. So we're very much trying to tap into what he's perfectly capable of instinctively.

I've got another lad who would probably be able to coach himself knowledge-wise of the swing. He completely gets every bit that I'm talking about and pre-empts what I'm doing, so we perhaps get into more technical stuff. Another player might not be quite so strong at communication and he will want to show me what he wants to do rather than tell me what he wants to do.

All these things you learn by understanding your person. I coach Lottie's sister differently to how I coach Lottie. And I coach Lottie's sister's friend different to how I coach the other two.

In the end I'm trying to coach them the things in golf which impact and ball flight that I've already mentioned. But it's the way in which you deal with each individual is different because of the way in which that individual is.