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Golf is a different sport than most. Baseball, football, basketball, and hockey are all mainly reaction sports, where you react to the situation that has just happened. In golf, you make the situation happen.

I transitioned from Baseball, softball, and football. At the age of 15 I started playing Golf, then I took a year off due to complete reconstructive Knee surgery at age 16. Actually Golf improved my hand eye coordination especially for baseball and racquetball

Growing up playing baseball, I had the "hit ball with stick" part down. It took a little while to get the "swing hard in case you hit it" part out of my game.

I believe playing softball helped me with making contact with the ball right away comming out of the gate which helped me to develop a love for the game fairly quickly. I think any sport that requires you to use an extension of yourself to strike another item could prove useful in certain ways. I, like you, am working on getting the ball to go in the right direction by attempting to develop a decent swing. I used to be fortunate to have someone helping me to develop a better swing by video taping my swing (using his David Ledbetter software) and giving me feed back about where I am going wrong as I am not in a situation that I can afford lessons at this time. Now that I am attempting to use a different method to hit the ball, I'm lucky if I make contact at this point. I'm not certain if my crazy looking baseball swing was more effective because at least I was making contact? I'm still working on the drills he taught me in hopes that my swing will improve and look more like golf than baseball! LOL Good luck to you :)

I don't know if it actually helps, but a lot of guys I played hockey with are pretty good golfers.
But any sport at a high level requires a sound mental game, and that's probably what translates to golf for guys coming from other sports.

I have played a couple of other sports recreationally while I was a kid, but never good enough to play anything organized. The only thing remotely athletic I used to do well was I used to bike for 25-30 miles a day. As a result, I have decent leg muscles but no real upper body strength. When I had my lesson last year, that was the first question Bob asked me was if I had an athletic background, because in his opinion, there are some things that do translate.

I would definitely say the hand eye coordination from other sports helps translate to golf.

My baseball swing helped add power to my golf swing, but I had to be careful about ripping shots down the left-field line -- on the golf course, i.e. Hooking the ball seemed very, very easy for me when I played baseball, but it also helped me drill power fades much farther than I can hit them right now.

When I stopped playing baseball two seasons ago, my golf game got better ... because I stopped playing baseball.

When I played baseball my coach would tell me to stop using my golf swing, my golf coach told me to stop using my baseball swing. Lol

Soccer was the only sport I played nearly half as seriously as I do with golf. Have never found anything I use in golf that I got through soccer.

I played football, basketball, long jumped, and golf. I lettered in basketball and golf. My dad always said that I would be a better golfer if I gave up basketball.

I grew up playing baseball and now play softball in spring and summer and everytime I start playing ball, my scores go up dramtically. Then they start lowering again once the season is over. Playing ball messes my golf swing all up. I usually begin scoreing around 10 strokes higher.

I think it helps to have played other sports. I do think it's hard to play golf part time and baseball part time. The swing is not the same.