The Greens Professor is a simple electronic unit designed to improve your cognizance of whether the face of your putter is open, square, or closed at impact. If you have problems getting your putter face square during your stroke, the Greens Professor can help.

You attach a reflective mirror on the toe of your putter, turn on the unit, and take a putting stroke. The device fires a laser that reflects off of the mirror to determine the alignment of the putter face at impact.

Unfortunately, practicing with the Greens Professor can be repetitive and boring, and the build of the product feels a little shabby because its design is predicated on attaching a mirror to your putter head with a piece of double-sided tape.

SCORE
83
GRADE
B-
Setup
96
Teaching Value
89
Fun
80
Construction/Durability
79
Cost/Value
83

Pros:

  • Simple concept
  • Value pricing available if you look around

Cons:

  • Difficult to use with a ball…and not much fun to use without a ball
  • Doesn’t have the look and feel of a polished product

Retail price: $49.99


96 / A

SETUP

The Greens Professor isn’t particularly difficult to set up. The only trick is applying the double-sided tape to stick the reflective mirror on to the toe of your putter (why is the backing of double-sided tape always so hard to remove? Grrrrr…) Otherwise, you just set turn on the unit and set it on the ground.


89 / B+

TEACHING VALUE

There can be many different faults in a given putting stroke, and determining what is causing your putts to go awry can be challenging – is the path of your stroke incorrect, is the alignment of the putter face at impact open or closed, or are you just reading the break incorrectly? The Greens Professor provides a nice way to determine if you have a clubface alignment problem and provides a practice method that can help provide a cure.

The Greens Professor is designed to build a stroke in which you consistently square your putter face at impact. It does so by providing visual feedback on whether the face is open, square, or closed at impact. The product consists of two pieces – an electronic unit that you lay down on the ground, and a reflective mirror that you attach to the toe of your putter with a piece of double-sided tape. The electronic unit emits a laser beam that is reflected back to the unit by the mirror on the toe of the putter. When you make a putting stroke, the unit determines whether the face is open, square or closed based upon the reflection of the laser beam, and shows the result on a small display window on the top of the unit.

The Greens Professor Video

Greens Professor video

You can use the Greens Professor by making putting strokes without a ball or with one. Using the device without a ball works pretty well, and we can see how repeated training with the Greens Professor can improve your putter face alignment over time. We weren’t big fans of using the Greens Professor WITH a ball because in order to determine whether the face was square or not, you have to look at the device’s display exactly at the moment of impact. What that seems to mean to us is that you are actually training yourself to look away from the ball during your stroke, which doesn’t seem to be a good idea.

Suggestion Box: A better design would be for the Greens Professor to continue to display the result for a few seconds after impact so that users can wait until after their stroke is complete to look up.


80 / B-

FUN

As stated above, we don’t recommend using the Greens Professor while actually stroking the ball, so that means that your practice will be repeating the stroke over and over again without a ball. We don’t doubt that this will improve your putter alignment, but we can also vouch that it isn’t a ton of fun.

For the first few minutes, it’s kind of interesting to see whether you have any specific tendency (open, closed or square). After that, we found ourselves just swishing the putter back and forth making phantom strokes and finding it difficult to stay focused.


79 / C+

CONSTRUCTION / DURABILITY

The electronic unit is made of plastic, but is constructed solidly enough. Where we got hung up is the fact that in order for the Greens Professor to work, you have to stick a mirror to the toe of your putter. The process itself is simple, but unless you don’t mind using different putters for practice and actual play, you will have to detach and re-attach the mirror between rounds. The Greens Professor comes with 3 extra pieces of double sided tape – after that, you’ll have to buy your own tape and cut it to the appropriate size. The mirror is small (about 1” by 1”), so you will want to keep close tabs on it. If the mirror breaks or is lost, you won’t be able to use the Greens Professor until you replace it.


83 / B-

COST / VALUE

Priced at $49.99, the Greens Professor doesn’t break the bank (at least not within the ridiculously expensive golf products universe), and it helps address a fairly important concept. At the same time, $50 isn’t chump change, the device doesn’t feel or look like a high tech product, and extended training sessions with it get pretty monotonous.

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