Dylan Smith wants you to understand your swing · BirdieYard
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Dylan Smith wants you to understand your swing
From a backyard net to Perform for Golf in San Rafael, Dylan Smith has kept the same aim: help golfers understand their swings. His RBFS system starts with four movements: turn, tilt, bend and sway.
Dylan Smith in Chicago. Photo courtesy of Dylan Smith.
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Meet the coach
Dylan Smith · Perform for Golf / RBFS Golf · San Rafael, CA
Dylan Smith coaches at Perform for Golf in San Rafael and is developing RBFS Golf, the Repeatable Ball Flight Swing system. His approach combines movement drills with ball-flight data, and he values students who are willing to practice through an awkward change.
The first time I took a golf lesson from Dylan Smith, the setup was about as simple as it gets.
It was toward the end of COVID. Dylan lived near me in San Rafael, a friend had recommended him, and the “facility” was basically a backyard, a hitting mat, a net and a camera.
At Alameda Precision Golf, Larry Zhou brings an athlete’s enthusiasm and a data professional’s curiosity to the swing. The goal: give golfers something they can see, understand, and take back to the range.
No giant simulator screen. No launch monitor command center. No wall full of swing data.
And I loved it.
The lesson was low pressure, Dylan broke down what was happening in my swing in a way I could understand, and I left feeling like I had something useful to work on instead of twelve new swing thoughts fighting for space in my head.
A few years later, a lot has changed.
Today Dylan coaches at Perform for Golf in San Rafael, where golfers can train with simulators, swing coaching, golf-specific strength work and other performance tools. He’s also building RBFS Golf — Repeatable Ball Flight Swing, a coaching system designed around a bigger idea: golfers should be able to understand their swings instead of endlessly chasing the next feel, fix or YouTube tip. At the time of our September conversation, the RBFS website was taking names for its launch waitlist.
The surroundings have gotten more sophisticated.
Dylan’s obsession with making the golf swing understandable hasn’t.
Dylan didn’t take the most traditional route into the golf business.
He started teaching almost by accident.
As a high school golfer, he found himself helping friends with their games. Several of those players eventually competed at Division I programs, he told me. Dylan went on to play college golf at the University of San Francisco. He said he then spent two to three years competing professionally on mini tours, winning three times.
But tournament golf ultimately helped point him toward coaching.
Dylan credits professional golfer Emily Childs with encouraging him toward a job at GOLFTEC. That experience introduced him to a more technology- and data-driven approach to teaching.
It stuck.
“Coach with data and not opinion” is how Dylan described one of the biggest lessons from that period.
Later came more coaching, two years working extensively with TrackMan in Chicago, and eventually a return to the Bay Area. Those experiences became the foundation for the system he’s now trying to formalize through RBFS.
Dylan Smith in Lincoln Park, Chicago. Photo courtesy of Dylan Smith.
Turn. Tilt. Bend. Sway.
Spend much time around golf instruction and the vocabulary can get complicated quickly.
Get in the slot. Keep your head down. Clear the hips. Drop the hands. Cover the ball. Hold the angle.
Dylan’s premise is that golfers at different skill levels perform those same fundamental movements differently. Instead of giving someone an isolated fix for the latest miss, he wants them to understand the underlying movement well enough to recognize what is happening themselves.
RBFS takes those concepts and uses deliberately exaggerated drills to help golfers build a more repeatable ball flight. The RBFS website describes its goal as helping players move from an average score of 97 toward 89 while building a more predictable draw pattern throughout the bag. That’s the system’s stated goal, rather than a promise about what an individual golfer will score.
That simplicity is one of the things I’ve appreciated taking lessons from Dylan.
Golf gives you an almost unlimited supply of things to think about. A good coach has to figure out which ones actually matter.
Dylan has strong opinions about technology in golf coaching.
He’s taught in backyards. He’s taught with a mat and a net. He’s worked with TrackMan. He now coaches inside the performance environment at Perform for Golf.
And today, he strongly prefers having data.
A golfer may hit a shot outdoors that looks perfectly acceptable. Launch-monitor data might reveal that the face, path, efficiency or launch conditions tell a very different story.
That doesn’t mean Dylan thinks golfers should live inside a simulator.
He draws a useful distinction between training for golf and playing golf.
At one point in our conversation he put it plainly:
“This isn’t golf. This is where you are training for golf.”
The controlled environment gives Dylan a place to measure movements and ball flight. Then the golfer still has to take those changes outside, hit imperfect lies, practice wedges, learn different conditions and eventually make the swing work when there’s one ball and a scorecard involved.
That distinction matters.
The technology is there to make the feedback clearer. It doesn’t eliminate the reps.
Golf remains annoyingly committed to making you earn those.
You might assume a coach with Dylan’s playing background wants to spend all day with top-level players.
Not really.
He has coached accomplished tournament golfers, high-level athletes and talented juniors. But when I asked him who he most enjoys working with, handicap wasn’t the deciding factor.
“I don’t really care what stage you’re at as long as you are motivated, focused, and accepting of coaching and want to get better,” he told me.
That means being willing to make a change that initially feels awkward.
It means hitting some ugly shots without immediately abandoning the experiment.
And it means practicing enough for the change to have a chance.
For Dylan, coachability is less about how good you already are and more about whether you’re willing to work through the uncomfortable part of becoming different.
You came for the driver. Start with an eight iron.
Dylan says many first-time students walk in with some version of the same request.
Their wedges are okay. Their short game is decent. Seven- or eight-iron feels pretty comfortable.
But the driver?
Please fix the driver.
Dylan will listen.
Then he may hand you an eight iron.
He wants to establish what the swing is doing with a more manageable club and look at data including club path, face and launch before moving farther up the bag. From there he introduces the RBFS movement language and starts looking for what he calls “light bulb moments” — when a golfer both does something different and starts to understand why it changed the result.
That willingness to slow the process down is important.
The golfer may have arrived wanting a 15-minute cure for the slice.
Dylan is more interested in giving them a framework they can still use six months later.
What a bad shot can teach you
One of Dylan’s favorite traits in a student is the ability to hit a bad shot without unraveling.
That sounds like a coaching skill.
It’s also a pretty useful description of golf.
With launch-monitor data, a mishit isn’t simply bad. It tells you something. The path changed. The face changed. The contact moved. Something happened that can be measured and discussed.
The challenge is staying receptive long enough to learn from it.
Dylan readily admits he didn’t always do that himself. He’s broken clubs. He’s carried frustration from one shot into the next. Competitive golf gave him plenty of firsthand experience with the mental side of playing badly.
That experience is part of his coaching now.
The goal isn’t to never get frustrated. It’s to keep one bad swing from owning the next five holes.
Again: annoyingly applicable advice.
What makes golf fun?
Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Dylan a broader question:
What actually makes golf fun?
His answer had two parts.
The obvious one is playing better.
There’s something satisfying about understanding your swing, knowing the shot you’re trying to hit and occasionally watching the ball do roughly what you asked it to do. Dylan still competes himself. In our conversation, he recalled a 63 at Presidio, a 66 at Cypress Point and junior NCGA titles at Spyglass Hill.
But he quickly went somewhere bigger than score.
Golf keeps people moving. It creates friendships. It gives adults a reason to spend four hours outside with other people. It creates a community you can carry with you for decades.
“The best thing ever about golf is that as you age, you continue to be athletic and with people,” Dylan said.
That idea stuck with me.
Because getting better matters. I certainly enjoy golf more when fewer of my tee shots require a search party.
But better golf isn’t only about getting a handicap lower.
Sometimes improvement means understanding your swing a little better. Feeling more confident over the ball. Being able to compete. Playing with your friends without spending the entire round furious at yourself.
That’s a big part of what we’re trying to build at BirdieYard.
Patrick McCarthy interviewed Dylan Smith in a Google Meet video call on September 16, 2026. The story also draws on Patrick’s experience taking lessons with Dylan and the public sources linked below, checked September 17, 2026. Competitive results described from the interview are attributed to Dylan.
Patrick McCarthy is the founder of BirdieYard and has taken golf lessons with Dylan Smith. Dylan has a coaching profile on BirdieYard. Photographs and videos are used with Dylan’s permission and provided courtesy of Dylan Smith.
