Eric Brasch’s goal: a golf game that works

From Dobson Ranch to the Navy

As a teenager, Eric says he had golf scholarship offers from around the country. But school stopped being a priority, his grades slipped and those opportunities faded. He eventually joined the Navy.

Golf came with him. Eric recalls spending four years on the Navy golf team, serving as its No. 1 player for three of them and traveling internationally to compete against other military teams.

After leaving the service, he returned to Arizona and spent seven or eight years playing professionally on mini tours. Eventually, he tired of the travel and the prospect of playing golf 46 weeks a year.

He moved into club and teaching roles, including golf schools and director-of-instruction positions. Those years gave him experience working with different golfers, in different settings, with different reasons for wanting to get better.

But the economics of the golf business wore on him. One of his early sponsors owned a mortgage bank and taught him that business. Eric built a second career in mortgages, which he still works in.

The change also altered his relationship with coaching.

“Teaching is a love and a passion now instead of a job,” he said.

A different way back into golf

The idea for 24 Precision Golf began with an unexpected reunion. Eric ran into a longtime friend from his mini-tour days at a skins game in Arizona. They had traveled together for years, but Eric hadn’t spoken to him in more than a decade.

His friend wanted to open a golf business and wanted Eric involved. They discussed a driving range, looked at the costs and decided to start smaller with an indoor facility.

At the time of our conversation, Eric said they had been open for about thirteen months.

The Ahwatukee space has two GOLFZON simulator bays and a roughly 3,000-square-foot putting and chipping area. Its moving swing plates let golfers practice uphill, downhill and sidehill lies, with separate hitting surfaces for different course conditions.

That caught my attention. I had recently played in Lake Tahoe, where uneven lies kept exposing the difference between practicing on a flat range mat and playing a golf course. At 6-foot-5, I can feel a downhill lie turn into a very different setup.

For Eric, the room’s value extends beyond the simulated courses. It gives him a place to show golfers what happened on a shot, explain why, and help them recognize the same pattern when they practice.

Start with your golf GPA

When I asked what a new student should expect from a first lesson, Eric’s answer began with the person.

“It totally depends on the client,” he said.

He works with competitive juniors, college-level golfers and professional players, as well as recreational golfers with handicaps around 18 or 19. A strong player may need one small adjustment. With many recreational golfers, he starts at the foundation.

He calls it their golf GPA: grip, posture and alignment.

Those are the setup details he wants to understand before working further into the swing. Eric still draws on principles from Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons, while using video and shot data to help students see what he is talking about.

One recent lesson shows how that works. Eric described a golfer whose club was traveling too far from inside to out, with the clubface open. The numbers pointed to a pattern; Eric noticed that the golfer’s shoulders were closed at setup.

After an adjustment to the shoulder alignment, Eric said the swing path moved closer to neutral, the clubface squared up and the miss got smaller.

The golfer’s reaction, as Eric recalled it: “Wow, that was easy.”

That example also gets at what Eric wants a student to take away. An adjustment is useful in the lesson. Understanding what the adjustment changed gives the golfer something to look for afterward.

“My goal is to try and educate as much as teach golf,” he said.

Understand the shot, then do the work

Eric prefers his current indoor teaching setup because he can work with both the shot and the information behind it. Club path, clubface, launch, spin and distance give him specific things to discuss with a student.

He wants the golfer to understand what those numbers mean for the problem they are working on, rather than leave with a collection of instructions to memorize.

“I want to educate people on why we’re doing what we’re doing as much as show them how to do it,” he said.

He explained that students can then return to the simulator knowing what to watch on the screen. Their practice becomes a way to investigate the same issue they worked on together.

His teaching has become more visual over time. Earlier in his career, he relied more heavily on helping golfers feel a position or movement. Now he can use video to show it, while still using feel when it helps the student.

That is also part of why he offers virtual coaching. Video already plays a role in his in-person lessons; reviewing a swing remotely gives him another way to point out what he sees. “Film doesn’t lie,” he said.

The information still needs to turn into practice. One of his favorite drills is a controlled half-swing punch shot, which he uses to work on setup, motion and where the ball starts. The drill gives him and the student a simpler movement to examine before asking for more.

Eric also shares tips on Instagram and TikTok. But a useful tip still has to become something the golfer can repeat.

Golf remains inconveniently unwilling to accept your saved Instagram posts as practice.

A game you can use

Eric is cautious about the idea that a recreational golfer’s swing can be fixed in a single session.

“You can give them a tip, but you can’t teach the golf swing in one lesson,” he said.

He describes the work as an algebra equation: identify the variables causing trouble and work through them until the swing becomes more repeatable.

The phrase he returns to is functional golf. For many students, that means being able to find a fairway, reach a green, stay closer to the intended target and enjoy playing.

“I just want you to be functional,” he said.

Eric keeps working on his own game, too. At 57 at the time of our conversation, he was still playing local events and qualifiers, practicing and looking for more efficiency in his swing.

His enthusiasm for learning hasn’t worn off. Neither has his enthusiasm for the moment a student understands what they are doing.

“I love seeing the light come on,” he said. “That’s why I teach.”

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