Who Is Phil Kenyon, and Why Does This Drill Matter?
Phil Kenyon is the putting coach behind some of the most decorated putting performances of the last two decades. His client list reads like a who’s who of modern professional golf: Rory McIlroy, Henrik Stenson, Brooks Koepka, Tommy Fleetwood, Justin Rose, Francesco Molinari, Matt Fitzpatrick, Max Homa, Scottie Scheffler. He has helped players accumulate over 90 wins on the PGA Tour and DP World Tour, including six Major Championships. He has been a fixture at four Ryder Cups. Golf Digest ranks him among the top 100 coaches in the world, and he holds Master Status with the British PGA — one of the youngest coaches ever to receive that designation.
When Kenyon designs a drill, it is not a random exercise dreamed up to fill a practice session. It is a calibrated assessment tool, built from two decades on tour watching how elite golfers practice and what actually moves the needle. The 100ft drill is the one he comes back to again and again, with players at every level, because it tests the three things that genuinely determine how well you putt: your start line, your speed control, and your green reading.
How the Drill Works
The structure is beautifully simple. Find a hole on the practice green and hit four putts to it — one from 5 feet, one from 10, one from 15, and one from 20. Use your full pre-shot routine on every single putt. Then move to a new hole at a different angle and repeat. You do this five times in total, giving you 20 putts across four distances and a possible maximum of 250 feet holed.
Count only the putts that drop. Add up the total footage of every holed putt. That number is your score.
Recording Your Results
As you complete each set of four putts, record your results immediately using the free Line Speed Read 100ft Drill Scorecard — available on this page. Log each putt as made or missed, and for every miss, note whether it was a Line error, a Speed error, or a Read error. If you missed left or right, record that too. This takes seconds per putt and turns a simple drill into a data session.
Do not wait until the end to fill it in. Memory is unreliable and miss reasons fade fast. Log it putt by putt as you go.
The Benchmarks
The targets Phil Kenyon uses are clear. Holing 100 feet worth of putts is PGA Tour winner level. The best score Kenyon has recorded in over two decades working with the world’s best players belongs to Henrik Stenson, who once holed 145 feet — a number Kenyon has described as extraordinary. At the other end of the scale, 45 to 50 feet is a solid club golfer, and anything below 25 feet tells you there is significant work to be done.
That is it. No equipment beyond four balls and your phone. No specialist facility. Just a practice green, your putter, and honesty.
Why This Drill Is Superior to Almost Everything Else
The problem with most putting practice is that it is artificially easy. Golfers hit the same putt repeatedly until they find their rhythm, or they stand over five-footers until they’ve made thirty in a row, or they do a drill that isolates one skill in a clean, pressure-free environment. All of that has its place, but none of it tells you how you actually putt.
The 100ft drill works differently, for several interconnected reasons.
It changes every single putt. You move to a new hole each round, at a new angle, with new break, new grain, new slope. This means you cannot groove a repetitive motion and call it skill. You have to read, aim and commit every time — which is exactly what putting under real conditions demands.
It tests all three of the skills that actually matter. Kenyon has long argued that putting performance comes down to three things: your ability to start the ball on your intended line, your ability to control speed, and your ability to read the green accurately. Most practice drills only test one of these in isolation. The 100ft drill tests all three simultaneously, because you need all three to work together on every putt. A perfect start line at the wrong speed still misses. A perfect read at the wrong pace still misses. The drill punishes every weakness.
It is distance-weighted, which is why the 5-footer counts less than the 20-footer. This is not arbitrary. A tour player expects to hole 5-footers. Missing one is a failure, but holing one barely moves the needle. Holing a 20-footer is a genuine skill test — it requires precise green reading, confident pace, and an accurate start line all working at once. Weighting the scoring by distance means that getting better at mid-range putting actually shows up in your score, rather than being hidden by how many 5-footers you convert.
It produces a number that is genuinely comparable across time. This is perhaps the most valuable thing about it. If you scored 62 feet last Tuesday and 68 feet this Tuesday, you improved. If you scored 55 feet with your old putter and 62 feet with a new one over the same five rounds, the new putter is doing something. The number does not lie, and it does not flatter. It is the putting equivalent of a handicap index — a single, honest measure of where you are.
How Elite Players Use It to Compare Putters and Test Technique Changes
This is where the drill becomes genuinely powerful for the serious amateur, because it is exactly how tour players approach equipment testing and technique refinement.
When a player is considering switching putters, feelings are unreliable. You pick up a new blade, the face feels soft, the sightline looks good, and immediately your brain tells you it is better. This is confirmation bias at work, and it costs golfers a fortune in unnecessary equipment upgrades every year. The only way to cut through it is with data.
Run five rounds of the 100ft drill with your current putter. Record your score carefully, noting not just the total footage but which distances you are making and which you are missing. Then pick up the putter you are considering and run five more rounds under the same conditions — same green, similar time of day, similar pressure. Compare the numbers.
If the new putter genuinely improves your start line or helps you control pace, it will show up in the footage. If it does not — if the score is the same or lower — you have your answer regardless of how the putter feels in your hands.
The same logic applies to technique changes. When a player works with a coach and adjusts their setup, grip, stroke path or tempo, they need to know whether the change is actually producing results or just producing a different feeling. Feelings change first and sometimes deceive. A higher score on the 100ft drill after two weeks of committing to a change is real evidence. A lower score is also real evidence, and it is honest feedback a coach can work with.
This is precisely why Kenyon uses the drill with his tour players as a benchmark rather than just a practice exercise. Before any significant change — equipment, technique or routine — they run the drill and record the baseline. After a period of working on the change, they run it again. The difference between those two numbers is the truth about whether the change is worth pursuing.
The Miss Tracking Layer: Where Real Diagnosis Begins
The total footage is the headline number, but the real diagnostic value comes from understanding why you are missing the putts you miss.
Kenyon’s framework for putting misses is built around three categories: line, speed, and read. A line miss means you started the ball in the wrong direction — the face or path was inaccurate at impact. A speed miss means the line was good but the pace was wrong. A read miss means the read itself was incorrect — you aimed where you thought the ball should go, your execution was sound, but the green did the opposite of what you expected.
These three categories matter because they demand completely different responses. If you are predominantly missing due to line errors, the problem is in your stroke mechanics or your setup — a SAM PuttLab session will show exactly what the face is doing at impact and where the path is breaking down. If you are missing due to speed, the answer is usually in your practice routine — more varied-distance drills, more attention to rhythm and tempo, less repetition from fixed yardages. If you are missing due to read, the work is cognitive rather than mechanical — learning to trust break, building a more reliable pre-putt process, understanding how grain and slope interact on the greens where you play most.
Adding direction data to line misses adds another layer of insight. If the majority of your line misses are left, your face is most likely closed at impact, or your path is moving inside-out through the ball. If they are consistently right, the face is open, or the path is outside-in. Both are fixable, but they require different corrections, and knowing which one you have is the difference between targeted practice and guesswork.
The golfer who runs the 100ft drill three times over a fortnight and tracks their misses diligently comes to their coach with real information. They know their score, they know whether it is improving, they know which distance is weakest, and they know what category of miss is costing them the most footage. That is a coaching conversation that actually goes somewhere.
A Realistic Benchmark Guide for Club Golfers
To give you a clear sense of where you stand:
145ft and above is the all-time best Kenyon has ever recorded on the drill, set by Henrik Stenson. If you reach this territory you are putting at a level that would genuinely compete on tour.
100ft is PGA Tour winner level. Reaching this score means your green reading, pace control and start line are all working together at an elite level.
70 to 99ft is scratch golfer territory. You are missing some opportunities from the mid-range distances, but your fundamentals are sound. With focused work on your weakest category, 100ft is a realistic target.
45 to 69ft is club golfer level. This is where the majority of serious amateurs score when they first run the drill. There is real room for improvement, but the path to it is clear — focus on the 15ft and 20ft distances where the most footage is being left on the green.
Below 45ft means putting is costing you shots every round, and there is significant untapped potential. The good news is that improvement at this level is rapid once the fundamental issues are identified and addressed.
Most golfers who run this drill for the first time are surprised by their score — usually in both directions. The 5-footers that felt automatic in normal practice become harder when there is a running total to protect. The 20-footers that seemed like lottery tickets occasionally drop in a way that feels genuinely earned. That is the drill doing its job.
Making It a Regular Part of Your Practice
The 100ft drill is most valuable when run consistently. Once a month at minimum, ideally once a week if you are in the middle of a period of deliberate work on your putting. Record every score in the same place — a notebook, a spreadsheet, or a dedicated tracker — so you can see the trend line developing over time.
Resist the temptation to cherry-pick your best round and call that your number. The drill works precisely because it does not allow you to. Run all five rounds, record the total, track it honestly. When the score starts moving in the right direction, it will be because something real has changed — not because you caught a good day on the greens.
That is what the tour players Kenyon works with understand about this drill. It is not a way to feel good about your putting. It is a way to know the truth about it, track the direction it is moving in, and give your practice genuine purpose.
One hundred feet. That is the standard. Everything else is the journey to get there.
