Navigation

Practice Tee – Short Game

Friday, 27 February 2009
Steve North
0 Comments

Steve North gives you some tips for your short game

Realistic practice
If your approach shot misses the green you’ll be extremely lucky to find a good lie. More often than not you’ll be chipping from a tricky spot so it’s worth practicing from all kinds of lies. A good way to do this is to throw a group of balls down and play them from where ever they come to rest. Resist the temptation of perching the ball up on a tuft of grass and test yourself from a range of lies. You’ll soon develop a feel for how to find a good strike no matter how bad the situation is.

Wrist assessment
Finding a consistently sweet strike requires a solid, reliable chipping action. If there is too much wrist hinge in your stroke your chances of fat and thin strikes will increase. Develop a more solid technique by pushing an old shaft into the top of your wedge. This will prevent you from breaking your wrists and flicking the club at the ball.

Push yourself
As you reach the end of the practice routine, test your skills from some more challenging positions. Chip over bunkers, from side-hill lies and take on delicate shots to tricky pin placements. If you set yourself a series of tough challenges you’ll soon develop a more natural feel for the game around the greens. Away from the pressure of trying to build a score on the course, you should start to enjoy the challenge.

See what Steve North means

Tee time
This is an excellent drill that players often use when they putt to help improve focus but there’s no reason why you can’t use it when you chip. The principal is simple – stick a tee in the green and chip to that instead of the hole. A smaller target than usual requires you to be more precise. Hit 20 balls to a tee, then when you chip to the hole it will look like a bucket.

Hole out
Throughout this routine, whenever you are chipping to a hole it’s worth putting out. Our short range putting will benefit from the practice but more importantly perhaps, it’ll provide you with some quantifiable results to judge your progress. With the prospect of holing a short putt, your focus will improve and you’ll get far more from your valuable practice time.