A lot of you have been asking what we are working on currently for the next incarnation of Secret In The Dirt. I can tell you now that we have two major phases of site improvement planned for 2013. One we are working on now and the other we will be beginning very shortly for release hopefully by mid-summer.

I've received a ton of email and personal messages from Dirters over the last 18 months since our last major site overhaul telling me about things that you all would like to see on the site. Some of it was doable at the time the questions were posed and we have tried to implement many of those things where possible when the suggestions were made. Others landed on a long list of features that would simply have to wait until our next core platform overhaul. Somethings the things we've tried have worked well....Others not so much but like learning golf you simply must continue to build daily on what you were doing yesterday.

It's no secret that I've got a soft spot for guys that have won the Canadian Open.  Leo Diegel, Sam Snead and Tommy Armour immediately spring to mind.  I also love unsung heroes of the golf world.  I wrote a lot about a bunch of them in the original Sevam1 Blogspot blog.  There are still a bunch of fellas and maybe even some gals that I still would like to write a bit about.  Today I want to talk about the late great and totally unheralded Ted Kroll.

"The future of golf is the good amateur.  That is what is at the heart of every club and that is the lifeblood of the game.  Always has been."

Basically that is what Mr. Burke said when we described what Elk and I

Over the last few months some of you may have been wondering "Where's Sevam1?...Where's Elk?".  The short answer is that we've been working on some things.  Early in the year Elk decided that this would be his "gear up" year for the Champions Tour and for Secret In The Dirt to similarly gear up for an exciting 2013. We began first to map out some ideas for a mobile app for Secret In The Dirt and in fact we completed one. We toyed with stats and scoring and interacting in a more mobile way with all of the things that everyone currently does at Secret In The Dirt.  We thought most importantly about how a golfer would actually use such an app on the golf course and the practice range.

Time for some current news and an update on some of what is in store for Secret In The Dirt in the upcoming weeks and month.  First as you have probably noticed we are now hosting our videos at YouTube.  The idea here is simple.  First the videos are going to be more easily shared throughout the web and will load faster for our friends in more distant parts of the world.  Second and more importantly all of the video in The Vault are now shareable and embeddable.  This makes them more usable now to everyone in forum posts, blogs and profile favorites and it also means that The Vault vids can be used not just in Secret In The Dirt but also pretty much anywhere that golfers talk golf on the web. The best thing a Dirter can do for The Dirt is to make sure that when you find a Vault Video you love whether here or at www.youtube.com/secretinthedirt please share it with your golfing friends.

For quite a while now I have been asked in personal messages and so forth to recommend drills for improving people's golf swings.  I've never been much of a "drill guy" except that in the 90's I became fascinated by Paul Bertholy and his static hold drills.  I thought Bertholy was a genius.  Still do. These were basically like dynamic holds of various positions in the golf swing and I actually pointed to some of those positions and demonstrated them in the original Sevam1 videos on YouTube. If I were to describe Bertholy's approach I would call it a static, macro or whole body approach to positions and drills.  These were essentially dynamic tension exercises tailored to Bertholy's informed vision of the golf swing.  He was revolutionary and largely ignored.  A shame, that is.

Every year around this time all of us up here in the north start to get that nagging itch to tip it up and play some golf.  We want to play but mother nature is just not quite ready to let us have a go out there.  If you can't play, the next best thing you can do is prep to play. To me, prepping for the season is mainly about conditioning and for my kind of swing action 90% of the conditioning I focus on is for the hands wrists and forearms and the legs.

As another year draws to a close and a new one begins it is time to take stock of where we are and to think a little about where we are going. Improvement in golf is an incremental thing. Those of you who have been in The Dirt for a good while know what I am talking about. It happens when players think wide and are open to a wide range of ideas.

Back a couple of years ago now when Elk and I first started to go over a lot of historical information about the golf swing, he was visiting just prior to the Canadian Open and I gave him a copy of one of my favorite books.  My Golfing Album by Henry Cotton.  Ironically he had a copy of this very book on in bookshelf but like many of the hundreds of golf books he'd collected over the years he had never really had the time to really scour through it.  That changed quickly and it soon became a favorite talking piece for us.  So much so that many of the first videos we did For Secret In The Dirt were inspired at least in some ways by what Cotton was all about in this book.
Some of you may remember a piece that we did called "11 Things" which we released on New Years 2010 as a single web page and a PDF.  This was the point when we decided that we would begin to build this website.

There is an old saying in economics that a rising tide lifts all boats.  It's not exactly on point and The Dirt isn't really economics but it is relevant in a way to how I feel about this site.  As Secret In The Dirt grows it has been my goal to help all of our members grow.  First I want their knowledge of this great game to grow. I then want their appreciation of the players and teachers who came before them to grow.  Most importantly through respectful sharing and dialogue I want them to learn here what they need to know in order to improve their games through a new environment of shared experience and social learning.