Cameron Young's rise into the upper tier of the PGA Tour has not been powered by a shiny new driver, a secret training block, or a celebrity coach. According to a new Golf Digest film study, the 2026 Players Championship winner's breakthrough traces back to a small, deliberate pause at the top of his backswing — a quirk hiding in plain sight every time he tees it up.
The study, which broke down Young's 72nd-hole drive at Sawgrass, framed the shot as a career-defining moment.
"So, this is maybe the best drive I've ever seen any pro hit under pressure," the Golf Digest analyst said of the 375-yard bullet Young hit on the 18th at the Players Championship. "It was the 72nd hole of the 2026 Players Championship. Water left, wind blowing, tied for the lead, and he had just hooked one into the water a day earlier."
The shot set up Young's tournament-winning finish, but to understand why he was able to trust it in that moment, the Golf Digest team went back to a clip from Young's junior golf years. There, with his father and coach David Young pointing things out in slow motion, the root of the swing problem — and its unorthodox fix — becomes clear.
"You know, his his hips work pretty quickly, you know, so sometimes if you know, a lot of guys are still, you know, trying to turn forward while the club's still going back and he just doesn't never catch up to himself if he does that," David Young said. "So, it kind of just gets everything back into a pretty good impact position given everything sort of start at once rather than giving those hips a head start."
The fix sounds simple: pause at the top. In practice, that small drill addressed a common problem for athletic juniors — particularly those with a baseball background — who fire their lower bodies before the club has even finished going back. The result, in most cases, is an over-the-top downswing, a loss of sequencing and a loss of power.
For Young, something else happened. As he grew into the drill, the pause stopped being a corrective measure and became a feature of his swing.
"He started doing this and started gaining distance because of it," the Golf Digest analyst noted. "And because Cam has a longer pause, it means that Cam makes a big long fall towards the target to start his downswing. He wasn't leaking power anymore. He wasn't skipping a step in the sequence."
The upshot is the kinematic sequence that elite golfers chase and amateurs routinely butcher — lower body first, then torso, then arms, then hands, then club. Skip the lateral shift, the analyst argued, and the whole chain collapses, which is why so many amateurs end up in a flippy, chicken-wing impact position with almost none of their body's horsepower reaching the ball.
"Cameron Young, he found that out early and he fixed it in his own swing," the Golf Digest analyst concluded. "It was the first step of his transformation into one of the best players on the planet."
It is an unusual origin story for a modern power player. There is no bulked-up speed-training phase, no swing rebuild, no exotic launch-monitor protocol. Just a teenager with a coach, a camera, and a problem to solve — and a pause at the top that, nearly a decade later, would hold up under the most severe pressure the PGA Tour could throw at him.
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*Originally published on [Golf News Global](https://golfnews.global/article/cameron-young-power-pause-swing-secret-golf-digest). Visit for full coverage.*
