After making his first Challenge Tour cut of the year in Austria last week, big-hitting Max Kramer is hoping to take his growing confidence home to Germany and the Bad Griesbach Challenge Tour by Hartl Resort.
The 29 year old is reaping the rewards of a new coach, and his growing reserves of self-belief could not be better timed as he looks to get into contention at the Hartl Resort.
Kramer had missed four cuts out of four in 2013 before last week’s Kärnten Golf Open presented by Mazda, but three out of four rounds in the 60s last week helped him pick up his first Challenge Tour cheque of the season, and he feels he is now on the right path to turn his season around.
“I am going in the right direction and things have been feeling so much better since I changed coach,” he said. “I am now working with Marco Schmuk, and even though I have only been with him for two weeks, my swing already feels a lot better.
“I always played with a draw, but Marco has now got me fading the ball and things feel a lot more comfortable and the confidence is coming back to my game.
“It would be great to be able to get into contention at home this week and see what I can do.”
Measuring a formidable 7,322 yards, the Hartl Resort may be intimidating to the shorter-hitting players in the field this week, but that certainly does not apply to Kramer, who possesses awesome power from the tee.
Standing at six feet four inches tall, the German is not too dissimilar in build to the ‘Belgian Bomber’ Nicolas Colsaerts.
Kramer’s Challenge Tour colleagues certainly know all about his prodigious power, with several of them joking that he was playing a different game in Austria last week as he regularly crunched tee shots more than 310 yards.
“I know the course, I played there on the EPD Tour a few years ago and remember it to be a good course with some really tough holes,” he added. “It will be great to play at home and I am looking forward to try to continue the better form.
“A lot of the guys on the Challenge Tour are talking about how far I hit the ball off the tee. I probably average around 310 yards, but I can get it out there past that.
“It is good to have that amount of length, but you still have to keep the ball in the fairway. There is no point in hitting it that far if you are going to be playing your next shot out of the deep stuff, so even though it is great to be able to hit the ball a long way, it is more important to be on the fairway and that is what I have been trying to do more recently.”
